The Napster Nightmare

Network admins—especially at universities—are tearing their hair out as this unassuming music-finding tool sucks up bandwidth, bringing networks to their virtual knees.

by Patricia Fusco ISP-Planet Managing Editor [March 13, 2000]

In its benign form, Napster is an integrated browser and communications system. Created by Napster, Inc., the free browser download lets musicians and music fans locate bands and music available in the MP3 compression format. [Read a review of Napster.]

Private network administrators, however, look upon Napster as a malignant organism devouring bandwidth by the kilobyte and sucking the life out of finite network facilities.

Some system administrators reported that Napster accounted for 40 to 61 percent of their networks' overall traffic. Yet others found that as little as 5 percent of their bandwidth was usurped by MP3 file transport.

Approximately a dozen university facilities in the U.S. and U.K. have blocked access to the service; students are naturally fighting the ban.

Campus ferment
The campaign to overturn the Napster ban is being spearheaded by a group of students at Indiana University called Students Against University Censorship (SAUC). The group's petition is posted on its website, aptly dubbed Savenapster.com.

SAUC is already claiming victory after the State University of New York overturned its ban, and reinstated Napster with a limit on the number of simultaneous users.

Napster spokeswoman Elizabeth Brooks said in a statement last week that the company was "aware of the bandwidth issues faced by some universities" and was working to address it.

Legal maneuvers
Barely six months old, Napster's MP3-sharing gadget has grabbed the attention of Web users galore. It's also grabbed the attention of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which is trying to sue the software off Napster.

It's impossible to predict how the court may rule on pending MP3 lawsuits. The music industry has sued warehouse-based servers like MP3.com and may shut the storage system even if it prevails in court. But Napster is not a server-based system. Napster is a facilitator that shows you who is serving what MP3 files, from where.

Suing Napster seems a bit like suing Rolling Stone Magazine for carrying a classified ad for bootlegged concert recordings. It's up to users to determine if they want to break the law or not. It's unlikely that the music industry will try to go after MP3 users, because it would be attempting file criminal charges against its best customers.

Frontline fixes
While MP3.com and Napster.com enter courtrooms to settle the matter with the music industry, private network administrators continue their struggle to make the most of their bandwidth.

System administrators have used a multitude of fixes to block Napster use on campuses and at the office.

Filtering is ineffective because individuals may readily access proxy servers for MP3 dowloads. Port blocking is readily outrun by spread-spectrum port number applications. Antiquated protocols may better prioritize packet delivery or banish packets by size altogether, but businesses' fear they may lose critical data.

One technician went so far as to add a DNS entry for Napster.com on the company's server. When employees enter the URL for Napster.com the request automatically defaults to the nearest Napster server. By adding Napster.com to its internal DNS, the technician blocks access to the site from the business network. However, the fix relies on the fact that employees do not know how to edit host files.

Throw bandwidth at it?
What both commerce and campuses have discovered is that it's often easier and cheaper to just add bandwidth rather than attempt to tweak bandwidth utilization and apply Quality of Service protocols throughout their networks.

Brian Rust, University of Wisconsin-Madison marketing communications manager, said Napster use on campus is not an issue for the Big Ten school.

"We have been checking into Napster use, not because of network issues, but more because of all the hype about bandwidth problems," Rust said.

Rust added that the university upgraded its campus backbone last year so there's plenty of bandwidth available for use.

Resources and priorities
Comtrends is a global Internet consulting firm that has worked extensively with universities in the U.S. Robbie Honerkamp, Comtrends president, said not all schools can afford to revamp an their outdated and overloaded networks.

"I work regularly with universities whose Internet connection is an overloaded T1 pipe to an overloaded backbone they buy from the state," Honerkamp said. "Network administrators are dealing with poorly-planned campus networks that they never expected to handle the traffic they're seeing now."

Honerkamp added that the facts are clear, a college network is there to support the educational endeavors of the school and its students.

"A network on a college campus is there for one reason, to support the educational endeavors of the school," Honerkamp said. "It's not there so students can run Quake tournaments in their dorm rooms. It's not there so I can grab a copy of the new REM CD from a guy down the hall over the network."

ISP-eye view
In contrast to private networks, Internet service providers have an entirely different set of priorities for their public networks. System administrations at public ISPs must strive to keep their systems free from Net censorship issues.

As with any type of content filtering, ISPs must offer subscribers the opportunity to choose whether they want their Web content and e-mail services filtered, or not.

If an ISP is fortunate enough to be able to operate a metered bandwidth platform, there is no motivation to curb access to any site on the Web. MP3, pornographic downloads, and interactive gaming and gambling are like money in the bank.

Some ISPs are considering feeding MP3 appetites as a fee-based service, regardless of pending lawsuits. Like many providers that offered access to Quake servers in the past, the proliferation of free servers undermined ISPs' ability to reap residual income from online gaming.

Students and employees are hooked. They need their MP3 fixes. The question that remains is whether or not they'll be willing to pay for the bandwidth to keep the music flowing?

—End