Have you had trouble streaming Netflix on the Athens Campus recently? If so, you’re not alone.
A few weeks ago, students started complaining on Twitter — and even calling the Service Desk — about poor Netflix performance. At roughly the same time, The Post ran a story that helped raise campus awareness about the issue.
In response, we dug into our network traffic statistics to figure out what exactly was going on. What we discovered was enlightening, to say the least.
In the past three years, Netflix bandwidth usage has quadrupled, with a whopping 20 percent of that increase coming in the past three months. During that same period, the amount of bandwidth the university allocates, Monday through Friday 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. for Netflix traffic, has remained the same.
That daytime allocation was designed to preserve some bandwidth during the week for research, academic and administrative uses at the university, not to completely disable Netflix. No wonder students thought we had started blocking access to the service. When demand gets too high on an Internet connection, things grind to a halt.
Bandwidth is not cheap. The university currently spends $175,000 per year for our main Internet pipeline. We can’t just let Netflix have as much of that capacity as it likes. If we did, movie and TV streaming would make the entire campus network unusable – something that actually happened in spring 2011 during the last week of classes. Can you imagine not having Internet and trying to study for finals?
We are not trying to take away your Gilmore Girls re-runs.
As a first step, we have quadrupled the bandwidth available for Netflix and will be watching closely to see if that alleviates the problem without slowing things down for other users. We also are looking into creative ways to manage our bandwidth that will make the most efficient use of our pipeline during the day.
It’s too soon to tell if the measures we have taken are enough. If you are a Netflix user, you can help us out by reporting performance problems, either by calling 740-593-1222 or by putting in a help request at www.ohio.edu/oitech. You can tweet @OhioIT if you like, but it’s much easier to troubleshoot when we can work with you in chunks bigger than 140 characters.
Talk to us: we listen.
Sean O’Malley is the IT Communications Manager at Ohio University
