On Tuesday, July 24, UMR IT initiated new campus network bandwidth management protocols to shape the flow of network traffic to and from the Internet. This replaces the current bandwidth quota system in place for students accessing the Residential Network (ResNet).
Most campus customers will see no changes in their network bandwidth usage. The new system only has an impact on those customers who routinely utilize an excessive amount of campus bandwidth. Business critical systems have mostly been identified (it is summer and some items are not in currently use) and special allowances have been made to ensure minimal impact.
All campus customers — students, faculty and staff — accessing the campus network are now subject to flexible traffic shaping rules based on the bandwidth usage of each customer. As a result, campus customers who exceed the hourly bandwidth usage threshold will have their bandwidth usage reduced until the top of the next hour, at which point bandwidth usage will return to the standard level.

In this way an individual customer’s bandwidth usage will oscillate between high bandwidth availability and low bandwidth availability for that customer only, depending on how much bandwidth the customer is using over time. In general, low-bandwidth usage applications such as streaming music, e-mail, instant messaging and web surfing will be unaffected by the changes. Downloading large amounts of data such as software distributions, applications, or other large files will result in decreased bandwidth usage for a short period of time (less than one hour in most cases).
Bandwidth usage is monitored according to a customer’s campus userid. If a campus customer has more than one system registered in their name and one of the systems exceeds the new bandwidth usage threshold over an hour’s time, ALL of their registered systems will be impacted by the reduction in bandwidth usage until the top of the next hour. All unknown or unregistered systems are subject to summary removal from the campus network, per IT’s Device Responsibility Policy.
For more information, contact the UMR IT Help Desk at 341-HELP or submit an online Help Request at https://help.mst.edu.