NEED OF BANDWIDTH MANAGEMENT AND FORMULATION OF POLICY FRAMEWORK FOR EFFECTIVE UTILISATION OF INTERNET SERVICES WITHIN A UNIVERSITY CAMPUS

NEED OF BANDWIDTH MANAGEMENT AND FORMULATION OF POLICY FRAMEWORK FOR EFFECTIVE UTILISATION OF INTERNET SERVICES WITHIN A UNIVERSITY CAMPUS Vikas Sharma1, Vikram Kumar and Balvir Singh Thakur2 1 ICDEOL, Himachal Pradesh University, Summer Hill, Shimla, India, E-mail: vikas_doeacc@rediffmail.com. 2 UIIT, Himachal Pradesh University, Summer Hill, Shimla, India, E-mail: er.vikram@gmail.com and balvir.thakur@gmail.com. As the web has evolved from mere an information exchange system to a knowledge creation and dissemination platform, the Internet is being viewed as a critical component of success by the researchers, teachers and students in higher education system especially within the universities and colleges. The IT managers dealing with network services within these institutions are very much concerned to make proper utilisation of available network bandwidth and to make it sure that sufficient bandwidth is available to every user for productive work. With the exponential growth of digitally rich contents and Internet computing demands for the last few years, the users often perceive that there is insufficient bandwidth available to completely satisfy their needs whereas the problem lies at the end of management who fails to identify certain bandwidth eating unproductive applications. In this paper an attempt is made to design and analyse a policy framework for optimal utilisation of Internet bandwidth by considering Campus-wide Networking System of Himachal Pradesh University, Summer Hill, Shimla as a case study. The findings of the study indicate that there is a need to take all stakeholders in confidence before designing and implementation of Internet Access Policy in addition to deployment of sophisticated and secure communication equipments for optimal utilisation of bandwidth.