How are they able to support thousands of users at one time? I do a speed test and they aren’t like fiber optics level of speeds so how can they have so many users at one time? Is it because there are so many routers placed around the area? But even when I’m on campus I don’t see any wireless routers outside.
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Its called a dedicated circuit. Companies buy bandwidth from the carrier thats not shared with anyone else, like you and your neighbor would be.
Many college campuses are their own internet service provider and have tons of bandwidth. Regardless of whether a college campus is their own ISP or not, they limit the bandwidth of each individual connection to prevent overloading and abuse.
It’s fascinating how large properties/campuses manage to handle such high internet bandwidths for numerous users simultaneously, even without noticeable wireless routers outside
I wonder if there’s a secret infrastructure in place to ensure efficient connectivity.
Colleges and Universities were among the first organizations to have internet access
They are often their own ISPs in a sense with fiber optics tied directly into the internet backbone.
So they can have gigabits of dedicated bandwidth available.
Collages usually have Multiple fiber connections bound together to service the campus. 100+ Gigabytes per second. they divvy this out with routers to all the students, staff and support equipment. So you sitting on your bed in your dorm room get a small chunk of all that. They can, and do tightly control how much bandwidth any one endpoint (computer) can get, which is why you don’t see fiber speeds on student devices.
The metering is done through Routers and Access points and Servers, to make sure no one person can monopolize the connection. and essential services can still get through, even if things are congested. Large scale network design is complicated, and pretty interesting. making sure 10,000 students can all get on youtube at the same time is not a trivial task. there is a lot of hardware and software to make that work. Hundreds of access points, Switches and miles of cable connecting everything.
At home you might have one access point or cable service a few blocks. A large company or school many have 2 or 3 just for them.
1 Gb connection servicing 100 houses or 1 100gb or more connection for 1 company.
To answer the speed test question, all the Waps at our school are limited to ~100 mbits but we have 2000mbits into the school. Have to login to the server to see those speeds on a speed test.
I’m seeing a lot of answers here claiming they just have massive connections, which is not necessarily true. I’ll chime in here as a network engineer (I can add my certifications if someone is curious).
Let’s start with your home network as an example. Your little ISP provided box is what we would call an edge device. This device takes everything going out or coming in and shoves it through as fast as possible. GO GO GO GO GO is what it does. Remember though, this is an “edge” device. So there is an inside (your house) and an outside (the big scary internet).
Now let’s look at a campus. A campus can be multiple buildings or one big building. But they’re all “the inside”, meaning that traffic from one building to another, or inside the building stays “inside” and doesn’t go “outside”. The campus can even have a data center in another location, but have a tunnel to it. So that data center would still be “the inside”, despite using a “outside” line. So only the traffic for the data center would hit the “edge” device we see above. All this “inside” traffic gets a lot of priority. Which brings us to something called QoS (Quality of Service). What this does is allow us to limit or unlimit different kinds of traffic that goes through the “edge” device. So, you could allow all the traffic to the data center without any limitations, because that’s all “inside” traffic, but you could limit how much Spotify traffic there is, which would be “outside” traffic. You could also have a few lines going to “outside” traffic that have a load balancer, so if one line is getting full, the load balancer switches traffic to the other line. There’s a little more to it than that, but this ELI5 after all 😉
All in all, if you use all these tricks and a few more, it’s pretty rare to need more than a few 1 Gbit/s lines to connect up a big campus. There are always exceptions and design choices to be made based on physical, financial and technological constraints, so every system is different, but in a nutshell this is what happens.
So a campus is likely to have its own campus network normally builds will be connected in a ring or mesh design and their would likely be a two data Center or data room facility each would have its own connection to the internet. If a uni then the I think they are likely connect into the Janet network.
A campus like an airport would be similar but would likely have the isp and wifi provided by someone like Boingo who would cater for the 100,000 transient passengers per day. This traffic is all kept totally separate from the campus network.
A large airport may have say 10,000 security cameras, and lots of critical feeds for coms, lighting, door access, baggage and atc. Virtual lans keep the traffic separated and segmentation helps with further security.
This level of security contrasts with the uni where collaboration is a key driver.
Director of Technology for Public Education here.At my previous district, we supported 18,000+ students and thousands of staff on a 2GB internet connection with no issues. There are tons of ways to prioritize and limit rates to stay within your total speed limitation.
Modern network infrastructure allows easy and total control of anything and everything happening on your network. You can limit based on type of user/device, specific applications, etc. You can even set priority listings like: program A gets priority over program B if things are getting congested. For example, your device’s speedtest being lower, “normal” speeds is an indication that they have your account, device, and/or local network limiting your speed to only use a specific amount or a percentage of available bandwidth.
That being said, I do believe the district increased their internet connection speed to 5GB a few years after I left. So at some point you CAN hit a true bandwidth wall that requires you to increase your speeds, but you can fit a lot more onto a 1GB connection than you would expect.
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