Maxed Out
Here's a war story from the early days of SETI@home.
In January of 2002 the UC Berkeley campus maxed out its total bandwidth limit of 100 Mbits/sec. For perspective, many of y'all have similar bandwidth coming into your house these days. But back then this was a lot of bits. Still, the central campus networking group was slow to keep up with accelerating internet use and thus we hit this bottleneck much sooner than anticipated, and so every server at the university was choked and unable to send/receive packets through the traffic jam. As a result, the SETI@home project ground to a halt.
Of course this crisis brought into question an outdated UC policy. Up until then, for a tiny fee every month (something like ten bucks) you could get an IP address for a server, and connect it to the campus network with no limits on bandwidth usage. Our single SETI@home data server was transmitting data in both directions at 30 Mbits/sec on average, sometimes peaking up to 60.
So basically we were soaking up a third of the campus bandwidth, all for the same cost as somebody who wanted to plug their single Windows 98 desktop into an ethernet port. In fact, that one SETI@home data server handled more continuous network I/O than all the bits and bytes swirling around the ENTIRE INTERNET five years earlier.
However this log jam wasn't entirely our fault. Over Xmas break all the students discovered Kazaa, a functional replacement for Napster. When they returned from vacation the dorms became one giant Kazaa music piracy fest. Nobody saw this coming, and campus network engineers were caught unprepared for the sudden increase in usage.
But instead of combating illegal music downloads and pissing off students, it was much easier for the powers that be to force SETI@home off the network. It was a routing nightmare, but eventually we were able to install a commercial link for dedicated SETI@home use. It cost $1000/month for our own gigabit. Of course, none of the ancient network infrastructure coming out of our lab could handle that rate, so even though we were paying for a full gigabit, we were capped at 100 Mbit. At least we didn't have to share.
Campus eventually dragged their computing infrastructure into the modern age, but it took about 10 years of nagging and bureaucracy before they let us back on their network again. Nowadays I manage three dozen data servers at Berkeley for Breakthrough Listen, each with its own dedicated and ridiculously inexpensive 10 Gbit link to the world. Times certainly have changed.