Bandwidth Management

In an effort to manage network traffic, FSU prioritizes traffic on the network.

The links on our campus network have plenty of excess capacity for any reasonable traffic conditions. The links to or from our campus network to the Internet do get congested at times though. During times of congestion, packets are dropped and then automatically retransmitted. This can result in slow responses as noticed by the user.

We prioritize all traffic originating on our campus network by application type. Traffic that controls the network is given the top priority. Next priority is given to human type traffic like telnet and web browsing and Pop resulting from human keystrokes. E-mail and bulk traffic is lower priority. The lowest priority is everything else including file-sharing traffic. Most of the time we do not have congestion and no packets are dropped. If the links to the Internet do get congested, you should not experience a slowdown since only non-human type traffic is dropped.

There are many places on the Internet where congestion occurs. If you are experiencing network slowness, try using the traceroute tool to determine where the slowness is located. Often the problem is outside the FSU network and we are unable to fix these types of problems.