Carefree Highway?

Universities have found that providing broadband access to students has not exactly created a Carefree Highway
By Joel Schofield

If you have never heard of the application Napster, then there is a good chance that you have not been hanging around colleges and universities lately. And it is a sure bet that you are not a university's system administrator. Napster (www.napster.com) is currently the most popular application that students use to download and exchange MP3 audio files through the web. This application has become so popular that it has caused major bandwidth shortages at many colleges and universities.

Napster poses a bandwidth issue for universities not because of the fact that students are downloading MP3 files, but it's from where they are being downloaded. Napster is unique in that they have developed an application that it calls "MusicShare" technology that provides students the capability to find and trade MP3 files. The bandwidth demand comes from the fact that the application does not direct users to a remote server where MP3 files have been collected and stored, it directs users to MP3 files stored on students computers who currently use the application. Each student's computer that has installed the Napster application, in turn, acts as a server with stored MP3 files.

Imagine a university with 15,000 computers featuring "always on" broadband connectivity acting as mini servers for MP3 audio files 24 hours a day, seven days a week and you will begin to understand the schools concerns.

While an application such as Napster is not responsible for bottlenecking universities by itself, it is however a prime example of a larger issue facing colleges and universities as they wrestle with the question of "How much bandwidth is necessary and what type of applications should it support?"

Colleges and universities are currently facing the challenge of upgrading their current infrastructure to be capable of delivering advanced services to students for the intended use of providing educational services such as videoconferencing, video streaming and distance learning applications to name just a few. However students, who comprise the nations most web savvy demographic, have embraced additional capabilities of broadband access to download music files, broadcast videos and play networked versions of some of today's most popular video games.

"At some universities Napster and other applications use 50% or more of the university's bandwidth," said Jeri Semer, Executive Director of ACUTA (www.acuta.org). "The schools are adding bandwidth all the time, but it is not enough. One school I spoke to recently added an additional T-3 line and it was at 104% of capacity within two weeks. They believe that Napster was a main reason why."

Can't get enough

This begs the question of how much bandwidth should universities plan to provide. "Realistically, the pipe's never going to be big enough," said Anthony Mordosky, President of ACUTA and Associate Provost for Information Resources and Technology at Bradley University (www.bradley.edu). "No matter how much bandwidth we deliver, the demand is still insatiable. More bandwidth leads to more bandwidth intensive applications. At Bradley last year, we tripled our capacity and it is still not nearly enough."

Many schools have explored the idea of filtering otherwise limiting student's access to the Napster site as an effort to preserve bandwidth for educational services and to also comply with copyright laws (Note: Look for a major feature covering copyright issues for broadband providers next issue). However filtering is not a feasible or attractive solution.

"Academic freedom is very important to us——it's what we are all about. Really, the last thing we want to do is to filter content," said Mordosky. "Even if that was a direction we wanted to take, it is very difficult to limit access to websites. Higher education is in a unique situation because one of our mandates as a university is to recruit and educate the best and the brightest. Any content filter or other software to limit website access we install, most student bodies can come up with a way to circumvent in the matter of a week.

Piper at the Gates of Dawn

Napster is currently being pointed at as being the leading source of bandwidth consumption problems at most universities, however most believe that Napster is a sign of things to come. "Pandora's Box is already open," said Mordosky. "I am afraid Napster is only an indication of the types of challenges awaiting us.

"Napster is just the beginning," agreed Don Kent, President of Channelseek.com (www.channelseek.com), an Internet based broadband guide. "Broadband penetration today is somewhere around three percent. By 2003, analysts predict that penetration will approach 40%. Currently, there is a rapidly increasing amount of streaming and other popular broadband intensive content available. However, the eleven-fold increase in domestic broadband penetration will serve as a catalyst stimulating hundreds of thousands of new broadband intensive websites. Also, there are thousands of entertainment and other bandwidth-intensive applications being developed today and specifically for broadband environments that will place increasing demands on capacity."

"It is a difficult problem. Right now, the easiest answer is to provide even more bandwidth - but that is a short-term solution that just puts a bandaid on the problem. There are going to be new and compelling broadband applications coming into the market in the very near future and they will appeal to an increasing number of students.

"At some point there will have to be a QOS (Quality of Service) protocol developed to manage bandwidth consumption. However, QOS is very expensive to implement and large scale deployment is still probably a couple of years away."

"The real issue is balance," said Mordosky. "Universities have to find a way that gives us the ability to deliver the capacity needed to enhance the academic side of the equation while balancing entertainment usage."

Unfortunately, there is no immediate, easy solution that provides universities the ability to achieve that balance. Ironically, even though technology is what created this problem for educators, they must place their faith in the idea that technology will also provide the answer.

"We are looking to technology to solve the problem they created," said Mordosky. "The ideal solution would have a way to prioritize traffic so that academic uses would come first and entertainment usage would be regulated to surplus. However I have not seen anything like that yet."