Network Bandwidth Increase
Feb. 16, 2009 by ravishan
I discussed some the late night network bandwidth issue in detail in one of my recent posting to this blog. One of the items that I discussed there was a proposal to CEN to purchase additional bandwidth at night. This posting is to let you know that we will be piloting a variable bandwidth strategy in cooperation with CEN for the next 3 1/2 months. Our bandwidth will remain 100 Mb from 6 AM till 8 PM everyday and from 8 PM till 6 AM the following day, it will be increased to 150 Mb.
Just to remind everyone, the problem we are trying to address is better explained by the graph below:
The area of the graph in green represents traffic coming into our network. As you can see, the bandwidth is at its maximum (100Mb) from roughly 8 PM – 2 AM. This is basically attributed to the increased viewing of multimedia based material on the web. The bandwidth then goes down as everyone goes to sleep and then picks up again in the morning when faculty and staff come to work and use the network. It picks up during the day as more and more students begin using the network.
This pattern repeats itself every day with weekends being slightly different. We have worked with the students from ITS helpdesk to test various ways to manage available bandwidth as explained in my last blog on this subject. Whereas we have made a lot of progress, we felt that adding more cheap and affordable bandwidth during the night will benefit everyone.
However, we need to be realistic about how much bandwidth (like the disk space, most of the available bandwidth will be consumed!) to allocate at night times and at what cost.
As the chair of the Network Advisory Council for Connecticut Education Network, I have been working with the networking staff at CEN and UConn to devise a pilot program which we will be putting in place tonight. This involves Wesleyan managing the network for variable bandwith allocation (which, the ITS networking staff have already automated) and making sure that the bandwidth expansion takes place only between 8 PM and 6 AM everyday. CEN has agreed to test this till May 31 in collaboration with us and will then decide if this is a workable solution for the future for all its member institutions.
The basic idea here is that at night, the K-12 schools and the libraries on the network are not using internet connectivity in the night, so why not resell it at a discount to the Higher Ed institutions who are in bad need of this. The extra money collected from Higher Ed will go towards hardware replacement for K-12 and libraries (due to severe beudget crisis in the state, the hardware refresh budgets for K-12 and libraries is under severe pressure). Of course, the pricing model has to be attractive enough for the Higher Eds to want to do this.
Though I cannot reveal the exact amounts, we are basically paying 25% of the cost of regular bandwidth for the additional bandwidth. It is really cheap and we believe that with appropriate shaping of the bandwidth, the students should experience improved network performance. I also believe that this model has a chance to succeed and that CEN will offer this more widely next year.