What is inbound and outbound traffic?
Inbound traffic is data that is received by your computer from another computer. Outbound traffic is data that is sent from your computer to another computer. Why has Carnegie Mellon Computing Services established bandwidth usage guidelines? Previous to establishing guidelines, the performance of our network link had slowed to where normal traffic, dataflow, and usability had been degraded, often to the point of being an outage. We discovered that a significant amount of the traffic from Carnegie Mellon to the commodity Internet was caused by a relatively small number of computers. In an effort to free our clogged commodity Internet connection, Computing Services implemented the Network Bandwidth Usage Guideline in February 2003. The purpose of the wired and wireless guidelines is to define reasonable use of network resources. Why were the bandwidth usage guidelines recently changed? When the guidelines were initially implemented, only outbound traffic was a problem.
