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Suppose in a company of N employees, you allocated an absolute cap of 1/N of the total upstream bandwidth to each Ethernet port. You wouldn't do that, because i

Suppose in a company of N employees, you allocated an absolute cap of 1/N of the total upstream bandwidth to each Ethernet port. You wouldn't do that, because it would be slow. So you have to recognize that what you're doing is over-committing bandwidth. You are relying on less than N users sharing. But, bandwidth is a freebie to employees. They gain and don't lose if they maximize usage. That means that they can and will pour effort into subverting any and all firewall controls. That's a race you can't win. Looking at it economically, what's the answer? Obviously, you have to start charging for bandwidth. Treat it as part of the department's budget.

TomOfTTB 18y ago
Tried it, didn't work out so well. The problem is that a lot of these people are doing actual work too. So you get situations where Department A needs the Internet because their applications are web based and Department B has all desktop apps. If you then choose to charge Dept A. accordingly they balk because they are being penalized simply because their applications are on the web. Also keep in mind that an IT department doesn't want to become the Internet police. Which is exactly what happens when you try to charge individual departments because they rightfully claim they can't watch their employees every second to see if they are using the Internet for personal use. Meaning it turns into a big hassle where you have to comb through firewall logs identifying each employee and how much internet they used and then create a report based on that. All in all it's a good idea in theory but one I haven't found a way to implement in practice.