How Big a 'Pipe'? Colleges Struggle to Provide Network Bandwidth

By FLORENCE OLSEN

Last year, Jeffrey Weiss began videotaping his course lectures so that his students could download and review the material.

ALSO SEE: Bandwidth by the Numbers: a Sampling of Colleges Penn's Bandwidth Impresses Some and Frustrates Others At Franklin & Marshall, a Robust Connection Is Taken for Granted Colleges Try to Figure Out How to Keep Bandwidth Costs Under Control Colleges Turn to Bandwidth Shapers to Throttle Excessive Use Colloquy Live: Join a live, online discussion with information-technology officials at Williams College and West Virginia U. about how colleges are dealing with bandwidth issues, on Thursday, November 1, at 2 p.m., U.S. Eastern time.

But he was warned that too much downloading could be a problem for the network at the City University of New York's Bernard M. Baruch College, where he is a professor of economics.

Mr. Weiss says he was told that video would tie up the network and prevent others from using it. "It seems like the only word they understood was no," he says.

Since then, however, the campus has undergone a big network upgrade.

The institution now has a network of such "gigantic pipes" that Mr. Weiss says that no one at the college worries about students' downloading his 20-megabyte lecture videos.

Even so, he employs a research assistant as a video editor whose job is to keep the lecture files as small as possible. "We edit because of bandwidth concerns," he says.

Constant Source of Worry

Bandwidth, or network capacity, is a constant source of worry for computing administrators. "It's one of our biggest challenges," says Todd D. Kelley, associate provost for information services at St. Mary's College of Maryland. A network's electronics and physical cabling largely determine the total amount of bandwidth that it can provide -- and that faculty and staff members and students can use. (Students' perception of how fast they can connect to the Internet is determined by the capacity of both the campus network and the Internet connection that the college is willing to pay for.) Many decisions about bandwidth boil down to what sizes and speeds of specialized network components -- switches, hubs, routers, and servers -- are suited to a particular institution.

Campus-computing officials, who must determine how much bandwidth is enough, see demand rising sharply with no end in sight. Moreover, they worry about what they pay for bandwidth, even though the "per megabit" price is plummeting for many institutions.

Most colleges offer different levels of bandwidth for different uses. The campus network provides local bandwidth. Colleges also offer Internet bandwidth through a connection from the campus to the outside world. In addition, some large institutions provide Internet2 bandwidth for high-speed research and educational projects.

Grant Crawford, chief information officer of the North Dakota University System, says bandwidth demand on the statewide network used by North Dakota's 11 colleges and universities "displays a fairly typical higher-education shape." As Mr. Crawford describes it, "There's a lump during the midday and a fairly active evening hour, which doesn't taper off after midnight because our customers don't necessarily sleep on the same schedule the rest of the world does." The last students "go to bed around 4 or 5 in the morning," he says, "and then the early risers -- the administrators -- start showing up at 7 o'clock" on the network.

Some institutions that have recently upgraded their campus backbone switches and Internet connections say they have enough bandwidth, for the moment anyway. Their bandwidth profiles compare favorably with Fortune 1000 businesses. A case in point is Jackson State University, which spent about $2-million to install electronics and high-speed cabling for a top-of-the-line 1-gigabit Ethernet backbone. The network can transfer up to a billion bits of information per second across the fiber-optic cables that connect buildings on the Mississippi campus.

No Congestion

The university pays about $75,000 a year to connect to the Internet at 45 megabits per second, and $100,000 a year for its 155-megabits-per-second connection to the Internet2 backbone. "With the kind of pipes we have, we just don't experience any congestion," says Willie G. Brown, vice president for information technology.

But unlike Jackson State, many institutions say they have little or no surplus Internet capacity. "We don't have a lot of excess bandwidth going out to the Internet -- we're pretty much at zero," says Kenneth R. Orgill, associate provost for information technology at West Virginia University. But rather than endlessly increasing the amount of bandwidth to the Internet, the university instead is "throttling back," he says.

West Virginia's network administrators use bandwidth-management tools to make sure that sufficient capacity is available from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. for research and instruction. "That means we throttle back on the dorms during the day, so they're not sucking [down] our backbone bandwidth," Mr. Orgill says. "After 7 p.m., we loosen up on it so the students -- it's mostly students -- can just suck it down as far as it will go."

Administrators, especially those at residential colleges, admit they find it hard to prevent the misuse -- and even abuse -- of bandwidth, especially among undergraduates. "It's a problem," says Dennis J. Garbini, vice president for finance and technology at Seton Hall University. "Last year's Napster problem pales compared with this year's streaming-video problem, and who knows what next year's will be?"

Bandwidth consumption in dormitories has become an expensive problem, prompting some institutions to consider ways to charge students, collectively, for what administrators deem to be "excessive" use of the network, most often during evening hours. As Mr. Orgill puts it, "we pretty much know that it's not purely research."

A Costly Spike

A few years ago, a sharp spike in dormitory use of the Internet "cost us a couple hundred thousand a year," says John W. McCredie, associate vice chancellor for information systems and technology at the University of California at Berkeley. When it appeared that network use in the dormitories "was headed toward an infinitely large amount," he says, technology administrators negotiated a cap on the amount of bandwidth the university would subsidize.

"That's what we call our standard service," Mr. McCredie says. Any amount over the cap is now paid by the housing office out of students' flat-rate dormitory fees.

Mr. McCredie says Berkeley has chosen not to use technology to throttle students' use of the Internet in their rooms, out of a belief that dormitories "really are students' homes," and that to restrict what they do on the Internet at home "makes no sense whatsoever."

Students aren't the only ones responsible for soaring Internet use at Berkeley. No one, for instance, anticipated that the Space Sciences Laboratory's SETI@home project would grow to consume 25 percent of the university's Internet bandwidth. SETI@home takes advantage of idle time on volunteers' computers to scan blocks of radio-telescope data for anomalies that could be signs of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. Mr. McCredie says that three million people around the world are now involved -- and that their computers check in with Berkeley's regularly to download new blocks of data for scanning.

Worrying Over Viruses

Viruses that infect networks pose another problem. "A lot of our students are naive about e-mail," says Mr. Kelley, at St. Mary's. "They're accepting and promulgating viruses, and the viruses are flooding the residential network," he says.

Many institutions have responded by purchasing site licenses for anti-virus software to protect their networks. Even if just a handful of students out of hundreds or thousands are "spawning viruses" from their e-mail, they can effectively cripple a campus network, Mr. Kelley says.

Given the rate at which colleges consume bandwidth, administrators say that the costs are having a noticeable impact on their budgets. West Virginia University, which has an enrollment of 22,000, will spend about $1.3-million this year for campus-network and Internet expenses, up 3 percent from last year. On top of that, it will pay $111,000 for Internet2 expenses.

Berkeley, which has 31,000 students, will spend nearly $8.4-million this year -- about $700,000 a month -- to provide campus-network and Internet service. Costs continue to rise, even though the prices for both Internet and Internet2 bandwidth are plunging, says Mr. McCredie, because Berkeley is using more bandwidth than ever before. The university, which buys bandwidth under long-term contracts, pays $350 to $400 per megabit per second per month. The price per megabit is at the high or low end of that range, depending on the amount of bandwidth that Berkeley uses in a given month. But Mr. McCredie has seen spot-market prices that were $400 to $500 per megabit drop to $200 or less. An increasing supply of fiber-optic cable in the ground, along with more-efficient techniques for sending signals over fiber, has created bargain prices for high-speed bandwidth in some parts of the United States.

Alaska Pacific University, while spending much less over all than Berkeley, has increased its network budget by 600 percent this year, a figure that's "definitely not representative of our annual increases," says Jeanne Clifford, the acting director of information technology. "We're catching up on things that we should have done last year," she says. The institution is expanding bandwidth and "tightening up security," she says, by purchasing a new router, replacing hubs with switches, and installing anti-virus software on e-mail servers.

"This year, we're spending about $110,000," which is 1 percent of the university's budget, Ms. Clifford says.

No End in Sight

Some technology administrators see no end in sight to spending on networks. A year from now, colleges that today have a top-speed network -- 1-gigabit Ethernet -- will have to "look seriously" at the next standard, 10-gigabit Ethernet, says Thomas A. Gaylord, vice president for information and instructional technologies, libraries, and institutional planning at the University of Akron.

"That will cost a couple million dollars for a school of 10,000 students," Mr. Gaylord says, "and more for big universities like Ohio State and Akron."

Wireless technology is not standing still either: A new wireless standard, which has a bandwidth rating of up to 54 megabits per second, is about to supersede the current standard of 11 megabits per second. Mr. Gaylord says that networks are becoming more and more like PC's -- they may need to be updated as often as every three years. For colleges, that will mean "having to take a serious look at your backbone and your wireless three times in this decade -- and that's a lot," he says.

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