Internet2 is used by hospitals, among other things, and as such has higher robustness requirements than Internet1. The pandemic created much higher demand for bandwidth from hospitals, forcing Internet2 providers to scramble to keep up in areas. As such, blocking high-bandwidth sites which are clearly lower priority than medical traffic might have actually been a reasonable move.
It might have been difficult relative to the infrastructure at some hospitals - but that is to my point that hospitals in general are not very demanding bandwidth wise and I would be a bit surprised they’re more than a rounding error on the Internet2 in general - especially compared to all the academic research involving large models and just video streaming in general that blew up during the pandemic.
Remote Desktop and even PACS are not huge bandwidth consumers in this day and age of 4K streaming. At my large academic institution usually only the radiologists use the PACS client directly on workstations - all the other clinicians are using a “zero footprint” viewer over Citrix like everything else.
> If everyone used it
Like many large facilities I’ve been in the US, the EMR and PACS viewer (for non rads) are often over Citrix (ie every workstation is a Citrix client). But how many people are simultaneously viewing images - it’s only a minority of users (both in general - the ancillary staff is not) and at any given time (most clinicians are not viewing images at any moment)
This is a large university affiliated center - the bandwidth used by the medical center is a drop in the bucket compared to the size of the pipes they (the uni) have.