Networking & Wireless

Lynchburg College Implements Bandwidth Management System

• By Leila Meyer
• 10/07/15

Lynchburg College in central Virginia has implemented a bandwidth management system to help ensure a fair distribution of network resources, so no single user can monopolize the available bandwidth.

Lynchburg College is a private residential college serving 2,800 undergraduate and graduate students, most of whom live on campus. According to Jeff Harris, network administrator for the college, most of the students have multiple devices connected to the Internet at any time and as many as 10,000 devices are competing for network resources on a daily basis.

To cope with the steadily increasing demand for bandwidth, the college has spent a considerable amount of money upgrading its bandwidth annually over the past three years, but Internet congestion and campus network issues persisted, particularly between the hours of 9:00 p.m. and 1:00 a.m., when most students were using the campus residential network (ResNet) for online study, work and entertainment.

The college has now resolved most of those issues by implementing a bandwidth management system from CirrusWorks called The Governor. According to information from the company, The Governor uses adaptive intelligence to "dynamically assign bandwidth to users based on available capacity" and "apply the most fair and equitable distribution of network resources to the population as a whole, ensuring that no single user encumbers the entire group." The system also works on encrypted traffic and doesn't "impose static rules or policies on user behavior."

Once the bandwidth management system was installed, "service complaints virtually disappeared," said Harris. The system also does not require ongoing management and upgrade configuration, so he has been able to free up some personnel resources.