(campustechnology.com, November 13, 2009) 
The next time a college or university considers an expensive upgrade to its network to accommodate growing demand, it might be good to remember that the increased demand isn't necessarily owing to greater use of the course management system or student retention program. According to recent research, more than three-quarters of all bandwidth consumed on campus is actually taken up with applications that fall into the categories of gaming, social networking, media, file sharing, and Web browsing.
Peer to peer (P2P) file sharing all by itself takes up a whopping 22 percent of total bandwidth. Plus, the research found that students are taking extra steps to conceal their online activity, belying the notion that university networks are considered "open" by their users.
The examination of higher education environments was done as part of a broader assessment of business networks by Palo Alto Networks, which sells firewalls and access network control products. Palo Alto often installs a demonstration firewall on a prospect's network to monitor activity--typically what travels through the Internet gateway--and then generates a report based on seven days' worth of application and threat activity.
"We'll produce the report and meet with the CIO and the security team and say, 'This is what we found,'" explained Product Marketing Manager Matt Keil, author of the report."Nine times out of 10, [they'll respond], 'Wow, I didn't know it was that bad,' or, 'Wow, I knew there was a lot of entertainment on my network, but I didn't realize it was chewing X percent of my bandwidth. We need to do something about this.'"
For the research report focused on education, titled "Academic Freedom or Application Chaos?" and available with registration, the company compiled data from the 35 university network assessments it had performed over the course of 18 months to measure the amount and type of data traffic traversing the Internet gateway. During the brief period the networks across those universities were monitored, the Palo Alto appliances detected 589 different applications in use, guzzling 64 TB of data.
Pervasive P2P Of the applications found in use on university networks, 203--more than a third--fell into categories not directly related to the business of higher education. These applications for file sharing, Internet browsing, audio streaming, social networking, and gaming sucked up about 78 percent of total bandwidth and generated 48 TB of data. Because of the open nature of networks on campus, the author wrote, "blocking them is not really an option."
By Dian Schaffhauser