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Date Posted: 19:21:32 10/04/01 Thu
Author: PJ
Subject: Bandwidth Question

My husband asked me about bandwidth and I told him what little I knew..."don't link to people's pictures because that's stealing bandwidth." There is a student (who happens to be his advisee) at the university where my husband teaches, who is using 11% of the university's bandwidth (and the university has just purchased more). Something about T1 was mentioned, too. Anyway, what is a simple way to explain bandwidth to my husband and what in the world could this student be doing to be using 11%? Thanks in advance for your help!

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[> An attempt at an answer: -- Cygnet, 22:09:08 10/04/01 Thu

I've just taken a bunch of really powerful cough medicine, and I did this math without verifying my work. LOL -- if there's a techie out there who updates this, I may be off by a factor of 10. ;-)

Bandwidth is a way of talking about how big the 'pipe' is that you're using -- bigger internet pipes can transport more data, just like bigger plumbing pipes can transport more water.

If you have a 56K modem at home and dial into the internet over a plain old telephone line, your modem is capable of using nearly all of the bandwidth on that phone line - provided whatever site you're connecting to isn't running slower than the line itself (which is actually a fairly common thing).

There are the equivalent of 24 phone lines worth of bandwidth to a T1.

A single T1 is capable of transporting about 1.5 megabytes of data *per second*; 11% of that is about 165K. If the school has several T1's (not uncommon at colleges and universities), 11% of their capacity increases algebraicely (11% of two T1's is 330K of data per second, etc).

If, for instance, this student is taking up 11% of a single T1 of bandwidth for even one solid hour, they have transported 594 megabytes of data.

What consumes that much bandwidth? Downloading movies.

But if he's using that much bandwidth on an extended, hour after hour, day in and day out basis, it's likely the student is running a computer that has been set up to let other folks download movies and music from him.

Colleges all over the country have seen an explosion of bandwidth consumption from students this fall (preceded by explosions most every fall for the last 8 years from avid student interest in one new internet toy after another) from the downloading of videos.

Our campus doesn't allow students to connect computers to our network that 'serve' files to computers off campus. If your school doesn't have one of these rules, they might want to think about creating one.

Hope that helps!

LOL - hope it's right. I'm going to bed now ...


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[> [> Wow, I just learned a lot from this. Thanks, Cygnet! :-) and WSTIAU. -- Shirleym, 23:38:14 10/06/01 Sat


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[> [> [> ...and from me as well, Cygnet. -- Susan W, 22:03:56 10/07/01 Sun


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[> Thank you so much for that answer, Cygnet. Hope you feel better soon. -- PJ, 22:47:17 10/04/01 Thu


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