University Bandwidth Limit Question

[UnatcoAgent]

On my campus they sport a 1 gig a week limit. However, last year my roomate and I regularily would go over 30 - 40 gigs per week between the two of us. There is a page on the university site that lets you check your bandwidth usage, and we would never even come close to a gig according to it. We used Bit Torrent a lot, but not Kazaa or any of the p2p software.

I'm guessing it simply has to do with which ports they check? Or is it something else that lets us get away with BT downloads?

 

[brxndxn]

They probably just don't enforce it. My ISP supposedly limits me to 5gb/month.. but between my roomates and I, we sometimes put 20-30gb on it in a month.

 

[cronos]

you're talking about dorm connection, right? most likely it's just a soft limit, in terms of they will have a report on how much bandwidth each IP address is using in a month (or week, or whatever), but they won't take any action until it's really needed.

btw, be careful with bittorrent, people already got mail from MPAA for sharing/downloading TV series.

 

[UnatcoAgent]

Originally posted by: saxguy
you're talking about dorm connection, right? most likely it's just a soft limit, in terms of they will have a report on how much bandwidth each IP address is using in a month (or week, or whatever), but they won't take any action until it's really needed.

btw, be careful with bittorrent, people already got mail from MPAA for sharing/downloading TV series.

Yeah I heard about the warnings - I'm in Ontario though heheh

Ok thanks guys.

 

[Mark R]

I guess it depends on how carefully they monitor.

When I was at school, the school got their bandwidth from the national Joint Academic Netowork - this was billed at the rate equivalent to $35 per GB.

I remember being called up by the IT manager asking me to explain why I downloaded 50 MB of stuff without directing it through the school's web proxy (as it came from a P2P service, there was no way it could go through the proxy). Specifically, they wanted to know what academic project this data was for, and why I was downloading the data the way I was!.

I was told in no uncertain terms that if it happened again, my network port would be disconnected and I would be billed for any bandwidth used, as well as a hefty admin charge.