Pennsylvania’s King’s College was having the same problems with its Internet bandwidth that a lot of other schools share: students (and faculty) spend a lot of time online, and not always doing work. Hence, bandwidth that is meant to be used for academic purposes sometimes gets taken over by social media, impacting those who need the space to do actual schoolwork.
The King’s College network includes more than 1,000 nodes distributed among 30 campus buildings. The school maintains a 110 Mbps Internet connection through a local Internet service provider, and additional Internet connectivity to a regional GigaPOP.
But with 2,700 students, plus teachers and others all vying for the same amount of bandwidth, problems arose.
“When we first provided Internet access to our residence halls, the volume of peer-to-peer traffic associated with file sharing caused very inconsistent network performance,” said Rick Gasper, manager of network services at the school. The college tried several different ways to limit the peer-to-peer traffic, but to little avail. Many of the efforts tried also blocked legitimate traffic or were unable to keep up with rapidly changing peer-to-peer protocols.
When faculty members started to feel the impact, the school knew it needed to act. Among the challenges cited were:
- P2P applications were in widespread use and consequently slowed down the network;
- Faculty members had trouble accessing reliable Internet;
- The college couldn’t differentiate between academic and non-academic traffic.
Once the problems were identified, King’s College turned to Allot Communications’ (News - Alert) NetEnforcer product.
“We set up the Allot NetEnforcer demo unit and immediately were able to detect far more protocols than our current device could,” Gasper said. “We found that one student was using an encrypted protocol and consuming upwards of 4 megabits per second of P2P traffic. Our current device was showing the same traffic as unknown.”
Allot’s family of traffic management solutions provides precise network monitoring and control at speeds ranging from a few megabits per second to well over 100 megabits per second. The company’s platforms provide highly accurate, real time network intelligence about users and applications, including encrypted peer-to-peer traffic.
Once NetEnforcer was up and running on the school’s network, the impact was immediate. Among the benefits the school saw right away were an improved quality of experience; detecting the use of P2P applications and limiting bandwidth accordingly; prioritizing critical traffic; and minimizing investments in new network infrastructure.
“We gained back more than 25 percent of our bandwidth and for the first time, we actually had a good picture of our network traffic,” Gasper noted. “Allot NetEnforcer has continued to accommodate our increased bandwidth requirements.”
Edited by Alisen Downey