policy that isn't enforceable merely punishes those who play by the rules.
That said, managing a QoS (e.g. Packeteer) to enforce usage rules can be
very time consuming and expensive. After years of managing a QoS (Allot
NetEnforcer then a Packeteer) and constantly having to tweak settings to
ensure we got the most out of our Internet connection, we went a completely
different direction this year. At the recommendation of another school, we
tried the relatively inexpensive NetEqualizer and it has worked great. It is
both much less expensive than traditional QoS's and I set it up in 1/2 a day
and really haven't touched it since September!
In a nutshell, the NetEqualizer (www.netequalizer.com) takes a protocol
agnostic approach to allocating bandwidth. I merely looks at all flows and
once your whole connection is above a threshold you set (e.g. 85%) it
manages bandwidth by progressively slowing down packets for the top users
leaving the low bandwidth users and bursty users (e.g. web traffic)
completely untouched. Our utilization of our connection is much higher than
it was when using a traditional QoS and users have a better experience. Best
of all, it's very fair and rewards good behavior. It increases utilization
because it only slows traffic when needed and then only top user's traffic.
It also encourages high bandwidth traffic during off-peak times.
Tom Phelan
Peddie School
On Tue, 9 Jun 2009 15:05:41 -0700, Renee Ramig <rramig@sevenhillsschool.org>
wrote:
>Our school has been pretty loose about letting teachers, administrators
>and staff use the computers for personal use on their own time (prep,
>recess, lunch, after school, etc.). However, with applications and web
>2.0 sites taking more and more bandwidth, I have a need for teachers to
>stop streaming their radio station, stop watching the news videos, stop
>checking their Facebook, stop shopping for a new pair of shoes, etc.
>especially during school hours. I doubled the bandwidth this year from
>one T1 to two T1s for about 300 computers, and there are times when max
>bandwidth is being used for hours at a time, even though I know very few
>if any students are using it at that time.
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