Movie downloads have been bandwidth killers on many campus networks for a few years now. But as colleges try to control online piracy, they may find themselves frustrated by a new class of bandwidth hogs: social-networking sites.
At the University of Kansas, among other campuses, sites like Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube all rank among the most popular online destinations for network users, PC World reports. And a MySpace page is more demanding than a garden-variety Web site: A typical profile includes images and embedded files that are spread over dozens of servers. Contacting all those servers can bog down a network.
Bandwidth-shaping software, it seems, might be the answer. Plenty of colleges already use the software to restrict the bandwidth allotted to peer-to-peer transactions. The programs can just as easily limit the traffic tied up by social networking. –Brock Read
