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Internet Usage Statistics
Presented by the Student Assembly Committee
on Information and Technologies
and ResNet
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Internet access in the dorms has been slow this year because the "pipe"
connecting Cornell to the rest of the Internet is full. (The pipe is an
exceptionally large one, with two feeds that can each deliver 155 Mb/second).
Here's what's filling up the pipe:
Cornell Internet Usage by Protocol:
Top 5 Protocols, Oct.-Dec. 2001
| FTP - Unix-style file transfer |
Gnutella - an older file-sharing protocol |
| HTTP - World Wide Web |
KaZaA - currently popular file-sharing protocol |
| NNTP - Usenet newsgroups |
What does this mean?
- Over half the used bandwidth is from KaZaA
(the KaZaA protocol was
also used by Morpheus at the time when these statistics were recorded,
in Feb. 2002)
Of this half, about two-thirds of the traffic is outbound:
| Total Traffic |
 |
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KaZaA Traffic |
- Outbound traffic means people around the world getting files
from Cornell students
- In general there is no benefit for Cornell students --
only for the people who are getting the files
- 36% of Cornell's total Internet traffic is outbound KaZaA traffic
- If everyone on campus turned off only outbound KaZaA sharing
(files going to other people), we would have approximately 50% more
bandwidth for other Internet traffic
- This would mean much faster Internet for everyone!!
- How can you turn it off? See
http://security.uchicago.edu/peer-to-peer/no_fileshare.shtml
- You can keep using KaZaA or another file-sharing application to download
the files you want to receive ... that's inbound traffic,
which hasn't been causing as much of a problem
Average Internet Usage Per ResNet Subscriber
- The chart above shows the typical amount sent and received by the
heaviest bandwidth users: 95 GB a week, which is 50 times more than
the average ResNet user sends and receives.
That's equivalent to sending out the
entire contents of several full hard drives every week!
- The top 20 bandwidth users added together use more bandwidth than
the bottom 5000 users added together
(2,124 GB vs 1,993 GB during a typical recent week)
- The single heaviest user used the same amount of bandwidth as 2800 typical users
- Of the top 20 users, only 14% of their bandwidth usage is inbound
(downloading)
- Of the bottom 5,000 users, 70% of their bandwidth usage is inbound
(downloading)
What does this mean?
- The top 20 users are consuming bandwidth needed by others
- This makes everyone's connection slower
- Most of the bandwidth used by the top users is outbound; turning it off
would not interfere with these users' own activities
- The heaviest users on ResNet are unfairly slowing everyone's service