It has been hard to avoid the deluge of news covering the ongoing battle between the major record companies and the makers of peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing programs such as Kazaa and Napster. With the advent of faster Internet connections, P2P is gaining popularity, causing headaches for network administrators.
While the battle over potential copyright violations springing from the use of P2P file-sharing makes the headlines regularly, the drama played out on college campuses across the country is less widely understood. Here, the contention is between students who want to use their fast campus network connections to swap files and network administrators who need to cut down on bandwidth use.
With P2P file sharing, there is no central server holding all the files. Instead, every client acts as a server. In this sense, when users search for an MP3 file using a program like Kazaa, they are really searching the hard drives of everyone currently connected to Kazaa. While one user is searching for a song, another might be downloading a movie off the first one's computer.
While MP3 format music files are most frequently associated with P2P file-sharing software, students use it to transfer movies and computer software as well.
\I use Kazaa to get episodes of TV shows, mainly,"" says UW-Madison freshman Matthew Grohne. ""Sometimes I check out the music of a new band before deciding whether or not to buy their album.""
From a network administration standpoint, the bigger problem is off-campus users of P2P programs downloading files from students. University network administrators have two choices: Pay for more bandwidth (and most likely pass these costs along to the students) or ""cap"" the existing connection. The cap limits the rate and amount of data that can be transferred over a connection. This shouldn't be noticeable for typical internet activities such as surfing the web or checking e-mail, but it is instantly obvious with P2P applications.
Bandwidth caps are the obvious choice for network administrators, but students using P2P programs detest them. UW-Madison installed a bandwidth cap on ResNet a few weeks into the Fall 2001 semester, slowing P2P traffic to a crawl.
""The [ResNet] cap is horrible,"" said UW-Madison student Gavin Ladewig. ""It's bad enough when I'm surfing the Web, but downloads take days with Kazaa.""
The bandwidth cap does not apply between two computers on the campus network, allowing users unimpeded P2P traffic between two UW machines. However, few people seem to be doing this, possibly because of the difficulty in only viewing machines on the UW network and the wider variety of files available on the Internet at large.
Despite opposition from content providers, P2P technology has continued to flourish. The battles, innovations, and creativity it provoked are bound to continue for many years.
