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 guideline is to define reasonable use of network resources.
