Is bandwidth limited on big networks?

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SKYflyer

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If I am at home on our house's computer network, if I am getting something off bittorent, it is possible for me to choke our entire network's internet connection if my upload speed on bittorrent is too high. I am going to college this September, and I was wondering, is the same sort of thing applicable on college computer networks?

For instance, if I am getting something off bittorrent at college and I use up all the upload speed, will the entire college internet connection be choked by my bittorent? Surely this is not the case and they must have some way of regulating it, right? So I was wondering how they regulate bandwidth like this at college. Do they simply make it so that every computer hooked up to the network gets, say, 40 kb/sec of upload speed, and cap it at that?
 
SKYflyer said:
So I was wondering how they regulate bandwidth like this at college. Do they simply make it so that every computer hooked up to the network gets, say, 40 kb/sec of upload speed, and cap it at that?
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There are many different methods for limiting things like BT, from individual limits set per network segment or all the way down to a port, or by running bandwidth shaping tools that prioritize traffic based on type, destination, source, etc...
 
Good luck on the school network. When I was at San Diego State the net admins were being dichheads about traffic. All of those trunks to good waste when we could up pumped a ton of traffic in them. Hell they had the line practically for free from the Telco.

Your traffic will be pretty controlled however maybe you'll be a college where there not as bad. You could run servers on the network for a little while before you had to spoof another MAC before they caught wind of what was going on trace which port you were connected to.
 
calikool said:
Hell they had the line practically for free from the Telco.
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Why do I get the feeling there is a massive misunderstanding about how business works forming the foundation of this post?
 
VeeDubbs said:
You took the words right out of my mouth...
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Mine too. Trust me, calikool, it's not as easy being a sysadmin as you think. When you have 70 clients pushing 5 meg emails out a frac T1, and then you find someone running Kazaa, it's not something you just overlook.

Your sysadmins aren't being dickheads; just think if all the people on that campus started BT! If the routers didn't choke on the sheer number of connections, it would surely clog the pipe for everone else.
 
It depends on the university/college. My school was very lenient in terms of bandwidth. From what i was told, if you used up a lot of bandwidth in a time period, they were more prone to monitor what you were using it for then if you were a causual downloader.

Look on your colleges website to see if they have written policies about appropriate network usage. For instance, Penn State University, has bandwith policies posted on their IT website. PSU monitors bandwith and could shutdown the connection if the student is a repeat offender of their bandwith usage policy.

It varies from school to school.
 
RedComet said:
It depends on the university/college. My school was very lenient in terms of bandwidth. From what i was told, if you used up a lot of bandwidth in a time period, they were more prone to monitor what you were using it for then if you were a causual downloader.

Look on your colleges website to see if they have written policies about appropriate network usage. For instance, Penn State University, has bandwith policies posted on their IT website. PSU monitors bandwith and could shutdown the connection if the student is a repeat offender of their bandwith usage policy.

It varies from school to school.
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You are absolutely correct. It all depends on policies, the size of the pipe, and the amount of "normal" traffic.
 
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