Lynchburg College Implements Bandwidth Management System
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.
About the Author
Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].