-tictech message:
At 01:25 PM 3/27/02 -0800, Mertens and Sahl wrote:
>It would appear from this statement that the bandwidth issue is not due
>to, as Judy McName stated in a forwarded e-mail to this list, "Streaming
>media (things like RealAudio, Windows Media, etc.)[that] account for over
>10% of our total bandwidth use -- and sometimes more than 20%", but
>instead is due to a "bottleneck" at the University.
The bottleneck is between the Seattle School District and the K-20
facilities located at the University. All of the individual school lines
go to an aggregator where traffic is gathered together and then sent down
four T1's to the K-20 interchange at the University. Those four T1's are
the bottleneck, they don't have enough capacity to meet the demand. The
links from the K-20 interchange to the rest of K-20 and the greater
internet are fine. Solving that problem is going to be between the
district and K-20.
>Does the source of the problem originate at the University, as John
>Rowlands alludes to above (a technical problem) or does the problem
>originate, as Judy McName states above, at the classroom/office level
>where streaming media are blamed (a social problem)? I ask these
>questions because it would seem that if Internet II is the answer to the
>problem, then the University is to blame. However, if the answer is "too
>many streaming media connections", then the problem lies at the
>classroom/office level which, of consequence, raises a number of issues.
I must say that I am puzzled over the expectation that access to Internet
II will solve the problem. It doesn't do anything to add more bandwidth
between the district and K-20.
> > Please help to conserve our very limited bandwidth and keep it
> > available for instructional use by:
> > - not using streaming audio/video - don't listen to radio stations
> > online
> > - not playing online games from your district computer
> > - not downloading or uploading MP3 (music) files
> > - stopping all Internet file-sharing activity (Gnutella, KaZaa,
> > Morpheus, etc).
> > In addition to being bandwidth hogs, these last two activities are
> > frequently illegal because of copyright violations. They can result in
> > district disciplinary action, and the user may be prosecuted by the
> > copyright owner.
>
>This list of inappropriate uses conjures up notions of what BESS *can* be
>good for in the absence of a clear understanding of what the Web is
>supposed to be good for. It is quite possible that in the foreseeable
>future, BESS will be used to block these types of file transfers.
All of these things that are mentioned are not "the Web". Frequently,
pointers are made available to them by pages on the web, but they use
different ports and protocols. Web proxies help save bandwidth by storing
frequently used web accesses that don't change (both pages and
images). Thus if you have an entire class visiting a web page, then each
image and page is only fetched across those 4 T1's once instead of multiple
times. The problem with the uses above is that they are either impossible
or very difficult to cache like web pages. The district could very easily
block access to those services by blocking transit to the ports they
use. It seems to me that they're simply asking that if you are using
streaming audio/video, etc. to make sure it has an instructional use
instead of a casual recreational use (i.e. listening to a netcast of a
radio station or playing an online game at lunch).
"Mary K. Conner" <trif@imp.serv.net>
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