The school's 80 boarders have been contributing significantly to the load by using peer-to-peer applications such as Napster and Gnutella, and this traffic could not be blocked at the firewall.
"While it's important for our boarders to have the use of online services, we don't want them clogging our bandwidth with programs such as Napster," said Paul Butler, head of information technology.
A trial of Packeteer's PacketShaper system showed it could be used to balance educational and recreational Internet usage by giving the lowest priority to non-essential or bandwidth-hogging sites and applications.
"We have to balance recreation with education, and this balancing act is becoming more and more difficult as demands for bandwidth increase because more administrative functions, curriculum development and document management take place online," Butler said.
"Putting quotas on the bandwidth available to these [recreational] sites provides more flexibility than an outright ban."
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