Tools like Packeteer’s PacketShaper or Allot Communication’s NetReality detect when fat files are causing network slowdown. They examine packets as they move from the local to the wide area network and classify hundreds of applications. Companies can use the data collected to set policies?for example, allotting half of all bandwidth to Oracle applications and just a small percentage for specific file-sharing applications. Other tools made by vendors including Blue Coat Systems, SurfControl or Websense help filter unwanted applications. Evident Software takes bandwidth nuisance management a step further: It lets corporations track in dollars which corporate departments consume the most bandwidth. Then it’s up to the company to decide whether departments will be charged accordingly for their usage.

If charging bandwidth hogs doesn’t work, CIOs can always place a bandwidth cap on users who take more than their fair share.

LandAmerica Financial Group did this after analyzing bandwidth use. The real estate title insurance company has more than 700 offices in the United States that access the Internet through data centers in Richmond, Va., and Dallas. LandAmerica initially set out to use Packeteer’s network appliance to improve performance of its network, which often crawled because of peer-to-peer applications or if a worker simply opened a 20MB FTP file. Congestion took its toll on critical applications such as e-mail. To remedy the problem, LandAmerica set a 100K bandwidth limit to weed out heavy use of file-

sharing applications?like Gnutella and Kazaa?and file-sharing on instant chat. "People can use whatever they want up to 100K," says Matt Matin, a systems engineer. LandAmerica figures it’s avoiding $500,000 in bandwidth upgrade costs by using Packeteer for application filtering and data compression.

Others handle the bandwidth problem differently. At Oklahoma State University, Michael White, the university’s interim director of telecommunications, uses NAT (network address translation) to deter file-sharing. NAT lets him set up network nodes so that many end users share few IP addresses; 750 kids in a dorm might share six IP addresses, for example. That way, the outside machine seeking to copy files can’t easily contact an individual machine in the dorm. However, White says a lot of the peer-to-peer software is able to query the network "super node" to find a single user. He concludes the best antidote is educating students to set their computers so that they aren’t open for file-sharing 24/7. "Most students just want to download music," not share all their computer files, he says.