Who should do it?

Who should be doing Bandwidth Management? Who benefits/would benefit most from it?

• Universities
• Small organisations
• Internet providers (ISPs)
• Anyone with a shared connection (finite resource)

Why should they do it?

• To download important documents and files
• To make VoIP work
• To reduce complaints from users (University VCs get a lot of complaints)
• To avoid abuse of contended resources (ISPs live on contention ratios)

How can we do it?

Two main approaches:

• Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees, traffic shaping
• Traffic quotas (BCrouter, RADIUS, pmacct, pmGraph)

Quotas tend to be used:

• by large organisations
• where all users are approximately equal (e.g. ISPs, students in a university)
• where it's hard to block certain types of traffic (politically or practically)
• and it's OK to penalise some users for legitimate heavy usage

Tools:

• Linux TC
• BSD PF and ALTQ
• Untangle (free download or hardware boxes)
• NetEnforcer
• PacketFence
• Packeteer
• Cheap Linux-based routers and APs
• RADIUS 802.1x authentication

Why do we not do it?

• Tools exist, but:
• Extremely high level of technical skill required to do it well
• (Over-)Simplified by expensive commercial tools with point-and-click interfaces
• High cost in time (free) or money (commercial)
• Lack of commitment/policy from institution/organisation management
• Lack of value? Or lack of recognition of value?
• Lack of funding/finance for promotion, training, tool development

What can we do about it?

Things that might encourage more people to adopt good bandwidth and network management:

• Encouragement/support/training from NRENs to universities
• A roving team of experts: NREN, UbuntuNet or Network Engineers Without Borders (NEWB)
• Need to ensure that we build capacity instead of leaving an unsustainable solution
• Persuade senior management of the opportunity costs/alternatives: "you can save money by optimising your existing connection instead of upgrading"
• Online learning programme for cheaper mass distance education
• Self-paced learning programme with accreditation
• Stop trying to develop better GUIs for open source and give in to commercial alternatives?
• Sponsorship for training from vendors, publishers, Facebook?

And one particular tool proposed: a speedtest/bandwidth map that lets (university) users measure their own network performance (page loading times), rate them, and compare with other institutions in the area. Reasons:

• Empower non-technical users to understand their situation
• Empower them with hard evidence to present to senior management
• A public commendation/embarrassment/incentive to organisation management
• Try to get to the top of the league table!
• Provide data for the bandwidth map (web accessibility) project

How to make it happen:

• Hack day to create the software
• Tell people about it in AfNOG
• Encourage publishers to link to it from their PDF download pages