Napster Eating Up Stanford's Bandwidth

The Stanford community is consuming its Internet resources at a
greater pace than existing equipment capacity and funding sources
can support. To assure that faculty, students and staff continue to
have timely Internet access that enables them to do their work, ITSS
will implement new tools that will control overall Internet
bandwidth and give traffic to entertainment sites (e.g., Napster) a
lower priority.

Stanford provides access to two Internet networks. Stanford's
connection to the public Internet, often referred to as the
"commodity" Internet, provides access to sites that typically end in
.com or .net. Additionally, Stanford provides a connection to an
education/research network known as Internet2 or simply I2. This
network is restricted to universities, other educational
institutions and public and government research sites and provides
access to sites that typically end in .edu or .gov. Internet2
traffic will not be restricted by the new network management
controls.

ITSS recently made the Provost aware of the effects of Stanford's
increased use of the Internet. While the University did provide
one-time funds for ITSS to increase Stanford's total capacity from
its Internet connections, current use exceeds even this incremental
bandwidth increase. Consequently, you may experience noticeably
slower transfer rates during peak periods and occasionally,
connections may be dropped. New network management controls should
help reduce the impact caused by entertainment traffic and these
controls will remain in effect for the foreseeable future to assure
that Stanford is making the best use of its bandwidth.
ITSS is committed to avoiding any intrusion into Internet traffic
content and has no plans to "block" any Internet traffic. ITSS is
implementing network controls to optimize University resources.

ITSS will continue to monitor the situation closely in its efforts
to provide this critical service. To help the community be aware of
how they can help in this effort, ITSS is preparing guidelines for
using the network. These guidelines will be distributed campus-wide
in the near future.