Yes we see lots of Netflix. Whether is matters would be highly dependent on your situation (funding model, size, location). Our concerns/approach on two levels— Internet and LAN:
Internet: We charge for bandwidth. The students use more BW, they have to buy more BW from us, we use that to purchase more BW. No content throttles, no judgement, no problems. For efficiency and to keep cost low for students, we work closely with our regional education network, LEARN, which has peerings with Netflix to reduce costs (those graphs are pretty impressive). Some networks can justify their own caches with Netflix, but we can’t, yet, due to being a mostly commuter campus (only ~7,500 in on campus housing). No comment on caching alternatives. LAN: Wired environments are trivially engineered to handle the load. Wireless, is of course more difficult because the carrying capacity of the spectrum is finite. High Netflix use in a dense area (e.g. large classroom) could cause saturation reaching the limits of current technology even if well engineered. We are struggling with large/dense population areas like that. Its everything though, not just Netflix. I don’t see our dorms as a dense area-- they have not reached capacity of the spectrum, just an old sparse AP deployment scheme. We are in the process of increasing that density now and should be done by summer. -William ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
