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KEEPING THE INTERNET TRAFFIC FLOWING

Recently, the School’s Internet link to the rest of the world crashed, because the “road” that carries our electronic traffic became so clogged it effectively shut down the machines responsible for monitoring that traffic and making sure the traffic goes out in an orderly fashion.

At the heart of the problem is the tremendous growth we have seen in Internet use over the last several years. Of more immediate concern is the type of traffic that is taking up all the room on the road. The first traffic hog is software that passes copies of music and video from machine to machine. The second is the many people listening to streaming songs or watching videos from their computers.

To extend the analogy of the Internet as a road, you can think of all the requests for websites we want to view or email we send as motorcycles on a four-lane highway. The motorcycles get the information from one place to another very quickly, because they are so small and fast.

Occasionally on that road, they might encounter a tractor-trailer moving slowly, which is analogous to a large file being downloaded to someone’s computer.

When lots of people in the School begin to listen to Internet radio or share large multimedia files like songs and videos, that road becomes clogged with too much traffic trying to go through one area at the same time. Imagine the Bay Bridge on a Friday night at the
height of beach season.

Like the highway administration, we can keep building larger roads or we can begin to manage the traffic more carefully. In reality, the School is doing both. We have already replaced the connection between the School and the Internet from a 20-megabyte line to a 100-megabyte line. Here are some things you can do to manage your personal traffic:

• If you want to listen to music at work, listen to it on CD or with a real radio.
• Do not watch a video on your computer unless it is School-related or research-related.
• Do not install file-sharing programs like Gnutella, Limewire, Kazaa, Morpheus, or Bearshare on your computer. In addition to hogging bandwidth, these programs open your computer to viruses and hackers.
• Be careful of what you download. Personal downloads should be done on your personal machine at home. Downloading games or other large files at work slows down the Internet access for everyone on the network. Even if the download is for School business, if it can be done during off hours (after 5 p.m. or before 8 a.m.) so much better!

Information Systems wants to do everything in our power to ensure that your network is safe, reliable, and above all FAST, for all School-related activities.