How does Cornell manage bandwidth utilization?
Beginning in 2002, CIT began working with the Student Assembly Committee on Information Technology and a faculty committee on bandwidth to address the problem of excessive bandwidth usage, testing several options for addressing this issue. The final outcome of this collaboration was to implement a packet-shaping solution for Cornell’s commodity Internet connection. This went into effect in the Fall of 2002. The packet-shaping solution sorted network traffic according to protocol and application. File-sharing applications were assigned a lower priority than other network traffic and were also limited as to what fraction of the network capacity they could use. This did not block file-sharing applications from working, but was intended to prevent file-sharing from over-loading the network. This packet-shaping solution remained in effect for approximately two years, but has been discontinued as of October 2004 (although the hardware remains in place and can be restored if needed to address
