Word: bandwidth
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...traffic on the FAS network--that is, traffic that originates when users from the outside world retrieve data from student computers within the network--has led to a congestion of sorts. File-sharing is one prominent source of such traffic; students who share their music collection through Napster utilize bandwidth even when they aren't the ones who are actively downloading. The same holds true for hosting a website or FTP server. Since bandwidth is a finite resource, it acts in many ways like a highway. Increases in traffic lead to congestion, which in turn leads to a general slowdown...
Earlier this week, Harvard Arts and Sciences Computer Services (HASCS) presented a comprehensive, three-pronged solution to the problem. The first two parts of the plan--educating users about responsible bandwidth use and improving the network infrastructure over time--will do much to alleviate traffic in the long...
According to HASCS, the firewall is a content-neutral filter in the interests of limited bandwidth. But in reality, it implicitly suggests that certain types of network usage are somehow "less important" that others. For example, a firewall would allow a student to download the trailer for Star Wars: Episode II, but not allow that student to share the same file with others. But, for the larger online Star Wars community, both actions are equally important. A more "academic" example might be open-source software, which depends on a unique kind of active, community-wide participation. A firewall, however, adopts...
Ouchark said that increasing bandwidth is a possibility but that it does not provide a long-range solution, as traffic is bound to increase more and more every year...
...current traffic shaping policy, which limits outbound network traffic to 10 percent of bandwidth, is similarly not a permanent solution because of the difficulties involved in setting a specific amount of traffic that can flow in the outbound direction. A fixed limit does not account for changes in the total traffic...