Currently, companies (such Intel and Sony) and universities (such as Stanford and California), use bandwidth caps to regulate their connections to the Internet. As the amount of casual, low-priority Internet use among employees and students continues to grow, these institutions face rising network usage costs in the absence of bandwidth control. Moreover, when low-priority traffic saturates an institution's Internet connection, network administrators want to keep it from hindering high-priority network use, while at the same time, educating the end-users that bandwidth is not an infinite resource. By implementing a bandwidth cap, they are able to achieve both of these goals: to reserve adequate bandwidth while avoiding sky-rocketing cost, and to make the users realize the consequences of their misuse of network resources, while preserving the initial intent of the Internet as a worldwide store of information.
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