During my first few weeks at IITK, I once went to CC at 6:00 AM (not to study LoL, I had “business” :p). I had to download a 509 MB file, and it took around 7 seconds to download. Even if you account for the additional uncounted 4-5 seconds (due to the fact that Firefox starts downloading the file before you click the “OK” button), the speed is still very high. That was the day I realized that this place is absolutely heaven. I’m pretty sure you’d have had one such realization too :p And then you get used to it, until it’s no longer there :(
But have you ever wondered how much data IITK consumes?
I recently found out (thanks to @adarshaj) that CC’s website provides traffic analysis to monitor internet usage it IITK. There are two links: Airtel and NKN (National Knowledge Network).
We get most of our internet through the NKN 10Gbps internet link. The following graph shows the internet speed (averaged over the day) for the last one year, for the NKN link.
The green part is the average download speed, and the blue line marks the average upload speed.
Note that this isn’t the actual speed. This is just the total data consumed in the day divided by the number of seconds in a day.
The normal semester usage is around 2700 Mbps (approx 0.34 GBps). This comes out to be around 28 TB/day. 28 TB. Every. Day.
This graph also fits well with the academic calendar :
- The drop in July corresponds to the period after the end of the summer semester, and before the beginning of the new semester.
- The drop in October corresponds to the mid-sem break.
- The drop in December corresponds to the Winter vacations.
I was expecting the usage to be low during exams, but LoL. You’d notice a few peaks: one around mid-September, one at the end of November, and one in Februrary. These are the periods that correspond to exams. I’m not really sure, but I believe this is because people start watching NPTEL videos to study for the exams :p
Do you notice a very thin drop towards the end of October? Is that Antaragni? I think it is.
And of course, the drop after March corresponds to the lockdown :(
This was just the NKN link. The Airtel link has an almost constant usage of around 2.4 TB/day. I believe that one is used for the continuously running services.
Also, I’m pretty sure this graph has more interesting observations than I managed to find out. If you can see any, please point it out (either to me, or here in the comments).
