Enabling Bittorrent at the University Level?

Sorthum asks: "I'm a network administrator for a small university (approximately 5000 students all told). We're running NAT in the dorms, which obviously restricts BitTorrent traffic. We do an annual student survey, on which 'Residential Network' is listed as the number 2 complaint. This translates more or less into 'Bittorrent is slow here.' My boss is in a frenzy to appease the users at virtually any cost, but it seems to me from my research that the only real way to improve Bittorrent speeds is to start assigning public IPs to the dorms. Add to that the potential liability of making a service that by most reports has upward of 90% of its traffic fall into a 'legally questionable' gray area, how can I win in this situation?"

Re:You have to decide what's important

[daveschroeder]

Our restrictions for the residence halls really just come down to bandwidth restrictions.

Residents get 5GB/week off-campus (unlimited on-campus). If they go over this limit, their off-campus connectivity speed is reduced until their traffic usage goes below a 4GB for the previous 7 day period. Campus traffic is never affected.

We haven't had any complaints about usability of the residence hall connections. All other connections on campus (non-residence halls) are generally unrestricted, and almost all are 100mbit.

More info: http://www.housing.wisc.edu/resnet/aup.php [wisc.edu]

dialup over a digital PBX phone!

[r00t]

I got a little box that would go between the phone body and the handset. This little box provided an analog phone jack. It had a way to adjust for 4 different power levels, to be set according to your digital phone. I think it needed a wall wart for power.

Procedure:

1. take handset off hook
2. tell modem to dial (any number will do)
3. dial the real number using buttons on the phone
4. enjoy the 9.6 kb/s connection

Re:Limit how?

[sniop1]

Here at my university, in the dorms connections have a 24 hour rolling bandwidth quota (updated hourly) of 750mb off campus traffic, which is sufficient for the overwhelming majority of users. Connections are not speed limited up to 750mb of traffic. After the 750mb has been reached, the user is placed into a "Class B" tier of service where connections are limited to 128kbit per flow. If the traffic exceeds 1gb per 24 hour period, users are moved into "Class C" service, which is 512kbit pool for all users in that tier. This system worked very well for us, allowing normal usage but curbing the people that abuse the connection. http://www.lartc.org/ [lartc.org] has excellent documentation on how to get a setup like this up and running

We have public IPs at Leeds

[David Horn]

When I was in uni residences in 2005, we were assigned public, static, IP addresses which were fine for bittorrent. The IP is permanent and tied to both your university username and MAC address, and they were quite tough if the RIAA or MPAA reported abuse to them.

Re:You have to decide what's important

[Orion_]

Residents get 5GB/week off-campus (unlimited on-campus). If they go over this limit, their off-campus connectivity speed is reduced until their traffic usage goes below a 4GB for the previous 7 day period.

I would disagree that 5GB/week is really enough, but aside from that, I consider this a perfectly reasonable policy.

The problem is that the AUP you linked to flatly contradicts the bandwidth limitation policy as you described it. The real policy is that what you describe only happens the first time the 5GB cap is exceeded. After that, a series of increasingly punitive measures are taken, culminating in the fourth time when the user's off-campus access is completely revoked until he can "justify the reinstatement" of said connection to university officials.

This is completely unacceptable to me. I am a graduate student at UW-Madison, and this policy is the main reason I decided not to live in the university apartments. I know the university doesn't really care: There is more than enough demand for on-campus housing, and I'm sure the policy is designed specifically to scare off people like me that are likely to actually use their network connection.

But don't act like you have some kind of enlightened policy that relies on something as innocuous as throttling to meet the university's bandwidth goals, when in fact you have a policy that relies primarily on threatening the students with disciplinary action if they exceed their bandwidth limit.