User's perspective of bandwidth as a scarce resource

Abstract

With developments of the new economy, Internet has become an essential commodity for any organization to carry out their day to day business activities efficiently. It is an obvious fact that the real effectiveness of the Internet depends on its reliability: availability and usable speed. With advancements of the technology (both hardware and software) the availability of the Internet is no more a problem to be solved. But, still a typical complain of any organization is the speed of the Internet. Even though it is accepted that the speed is a relative facto:;; compared with an external resource or prior speed of the same resource, it plays a major role on the satisfaction of the users. When the internet service is provided to the users of an organization as a shared resource, the effective speed of the resource depends on the usage and behaviors of its users. Hence we can simply treat the internet bandwidth as a scarce resource to which the users compete (intentionally or unintentionally, directly or indirectly) to enhance their share. This research is targeted to identify such behaviors of the users in a corporate internet. The research is based on a case study carried out among internet users at University of Moratuwa.