Sitemap Contact DE EN

Home

• Home
• Company
  
  • Profile
  • Management
  • Jobs
    • Developer
    • Students
  • Contact
• Solutions
  
  • Providers
  • Education
  • Corporate
  • Government
  • Application Focus
    • VoIP & Skype
    • P2P
    • Instant Messaging
    • Streaming
  • Sales Contact
• Products
  
  • PRX Traffic Manager
    • PRX-10G
    • PRX-5G
    • PRX-1G
    • PRX-2000
    • PRX-1000
    • PRX-20
    • Protocol Modules
    • Feature Modules
  • DPX Network Probe
  • OEM - ipoque PACE
  • Protocol List
  • Sales Contact
• Support
  
  • Customer Portal
  • Release Calendar
  • Downloads
  • Feature Requests
  • Support Contact
• Partners
  
  • Sales Partners
  • Technology Partners
  • Partner Program
  • Customer References
  • Contact
• News & Events
  
  • Press Center
  • Press Releases
    • RSS
    • Archive
  • ipoque in the News
  • Newsletter
  • Events
    • Past Events & Materials
  • Internet Studies
    • Internet Study 2007
    • P2P Survey 2006
  • Product Tests
  • Press Kit
    • Company Profile
    • Images
  • Media Contact

Schools and Universities

Challenges

Operators of educational and research networks at schools and universities face a number of very unique challenges. Their often high-speed Internet connectivity in combination with largely unrestricted access expose these organizations to bandwidth-hogging applications such as peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing and media streaming. P2P applications like BitTorrent and eDonkey still consume well over 50% of the available bandwidth. Audio and video streaming applications embedded in Web sites like YouTube grow in popularity. The following chart shows the protocol distribution at German universities and is taken from ipoque's Internet Study 2007:

While this has an adverse impact on the overall network performance and keeps driving the communication costs, particularly file sharing also has a legal implication as most of the exchanged content violates copyright laws. The next chart shows the types of files exchanged over P2P networks at German universities. It is important to note that this includes not only downloads, but also uploads, where the university network hosts the mostly copyright-protected content. Depending on local legislation, this can potentially have serious legal implications.

Bandwidth Management

Bandwidth management using the deep packet inspection (DPI) technology of ipoque's PRX Traffic Manager to reliably identify high-bandwidth applications such as P2P file sharing can significantly reduce network traffic. One option is to simply prioritize important applications such as Web browsing, e-mail and Voice over IP (VoIP) to guarantee a high quality of experience to their users even at times of high traffic load.

In addition, the data rates available for P2P file sharing can be limited to a level that leaves enough resources available for more important applications. Optionally, each student can be assigned a monthly allowance of P2P traffic through the PRX Traffic Manager's subscriber management.

Legal File Sharing

PRX Traffic Manager offers a unique feature to provide full access to legal P2P file sharing resources such as Linux distributions, open source software and NASA imagery. Nearly all of this legal P2P content is distributed using BitTorrent. By putting all acceptable sources in the BitTorrent whitelist, such content can be accessed without restrictions, while access to all other, undesired content can be blocked. Many of ipoque's educational customers have implemented an online submission procedure that allows students to request additional BitTorrent sources to be white-listed.