Music-swapping hits sour note - Technology Information

Communications News, April, 2001 by Sean Kelly

Network and IT managers on college campuses are encountering an alarming decrease in bandwidth--thanks to the popularity of peer-to-peer (P2P) music-swapping programs among students. Napster's legal troubles have not stemmed the downloading--students are turning to other sites.

"When Napster first showed up on our campus, we experienced a horrible slowdown in the performance of our T-1s to the Internet," says Chris Marshall, network engineer at Denison University, Granville, OH. Transfer rates were slowed to only 1-2 kbps.Marshall notes that P2P traffic accounted for 85% of Denison's Internet traffic. "Our biggest resource hogs were off campus--non-Denison users leaching music from our students. Our outbound channels were literally at 100% capacity nearly all the time."

Richard Nelson, Furman University director of computing and information services, saw similar problems during the past several years at the Greenville, SC, school. As at Denison, the culprit was music swapping, with the majority of traffic outbound. "The problem is that the more bandwidth you put in, the more likely you are to be discovered by the people on the Internet looking for a fast download site," Nelson observes.

Blocking ports with firewalls and increasing bandwidth both fail on campus networks. Port-hopping abilities in music-swapping programs render firewalls ineffective. In addition, P2P applications eat up additional bandwidth--two students using CuteMX used up 80% of Denison's four T-1 lines for about six hours.

Just adding a second T-1 line can triple monthly costs--one Texas organization's T-1 bill spiked from $750 to $2,300, says Jennifer Geisler, senior marketing manager for Packeteer, which provides application performance infrastructure systems.

Effective network management--through using tools that can identify and prioritize P2P traffic to enforce Internet use policy--appears to be the best solution. Denison and Furman are now using an application-based traffic and bandwidth management system to discover and classify applications.

"The most effective way to prevent being blindsided by new file-sharing programs is to automatically assign a low priority to any new traffic not currently known to be present," Nelson states. A new application that is appropriate can later be given a high priority. Campus networks may have to brace for even more line-consuming P2P programs. Notes Geisler, "Could you just imagine swapping movies over the Internet? That's a lot more bandwidth than a single song."

The P2P problem will not stop at the college gates--businesses will have to keep a lookout for such problems. "Universities and colleges are typically on the tip of the iceberg," says Geisler.