Universities have the complex networks to serve different user groups, demand profile for residential building networks completely different from academic and administration building networks. Campus networks is always the test bed for all kinds of applications and games, 24 hours per day of high bandwidth usage is the biggest issue for network operator in Universities.
Why is QoS Important to Higher Education
A robust campus network with good connectivity to the internet is a necessity to higher education institutions. Students consider good access to network resource as a factor in their choices of institutions. It impacts both recruitment and retention. Students increasingly come to college expecting that the network will meet their educational needs, but they also expect it to provide their entertainment.
Today you could buy more bandwidth for less money than in the past, and this trend will probably continue. Nevertheless, it is often not practical to meet the increased demand for bandwidth by simply buying more bandwidth. Investing in neither a bandwidth management solution nor more bandwidth will leave you at risk of being hopelessly bogged down, to the point where no user is well served.
When Will QoS Become Essential to Higher Education
Bandwidth management becomes essential when the cost of adding enough bandwidth to meet demand exceeds the cost of investing in bandwidth management solutions.
Automated bandwidth management solution worked well, and is worth the expense, when other techniques are no longer sufficient to solve the problem. Don't wait until your campus network is on its knees gasping for breath before you begin to explore your options.
What Are the Issues to be Addressed
Campus IT units getting ready to deploy bandwidth management solution should develop a communication plan for the campus. Explain clearly to the campus what you are doing and why. Be ready to explain how your approach minimizes the impact on academic and freedom and avoids censorship. Emphasize the importance of giving all users fair access to resources as well as ensuring better access to resources that are more central to the mission of the campus.
PacketController Implementation on Campus
PacketController implementation is to address the following issues on campus:
Business traffic is more important than recreational traffic
PacketController could define all the business traffic usage as the burst condition for recreational traffic, so it allows for recreational traffic to increase when business traffic is low. It is better from management and public-relations perspective to throttle recreational traffic than to block completely.
For example, the uplink is 300Mbps, when business traffic usage is less than 100Mbps, the recreational traffic usage could be burssted to 150Mbps otherwise it could only use less than 90Mbps.
Apply different QoS policies to different groups
PacketController could apply different QoS policies to different users or groups based on IP addresses, VLANs etc.
Fairness for all the students
It is simply not practical to track down all the applications used by students and prioritize some of them. PacketController could AUTOMATICALLY identify all the online students and AUTOMATICALLY apply QoS policies for all the online students.
For example, there are 30K online students, PacketController could automatically generate 30K QoS policies mapping to those students, each student could use no more than 800Kbps (Inbound 800Kbps and Outbound 800Kbps).
This feature is so powerful that you could provide fairness to all the students with zero maintenance.
Scalable implementation
PacketController is also evolving to handle larger and larger pipes. PacketController has been deployed in University with 40Gb/s (full duplex) uplink and 300K students, so you are assured that PacketController can scale well.
Conclusions
Unlike other vendors on P2P application control, PacketController proposes net neutral solution in higher education environment: both outbound and inbound hard rate limit applies to IP address ranges with pre-defined user group service. And all of this is automated.