Pipes are bursting on college campuses across the country. But it’s not any fluid that’s overflowing - it’s data.
Bandwidth, the amount of space available on a network connection, is becoming a concern for some colleges with high-speed connections to the Internet. Too much downloading at once, such as music, movies and Internet games, can slow down the speed of information transfer.
At Rutgers University in New Jersey, students face an unbending penalty for overstepping their bandwidth boundaries.
“All students abide by our acceptable use policy,” said Michael Mundrane, director for the Telecommunications Division at Rutgers. “What we did was elaborate on what specific limits constituted abuse of the accepted use policy.”
What this means for students on Rutgers’ campus is that any student who downloads too much information per week- more than 2 GB - is locked temporarily from the network. Uploading is restricted further, allowing only a half-gigabyte per week.
Although less than 2 percent of the computers on Rutgers’ residence hall connection use more than 50 percent of the university’s available bandwidth, every student must abide by the limitation. But Rutgers’ administrators said most students find the limitation to be comfortable.
Rutgers has about the same high-speed connection as MSU, which is nearly 3,000 times faster than a 56k modem under the best conditions. But despite the equipment similarities, the difference is in the strain on the network.
“Our network is robust enough to handle the load,” said Lewis Greenberg, director of the Computer Center. “One of the key pieces to this university’s operation is privacy, we don’t look at e-mail, and we don’t examine (data) packets. I think it’s fundamental to how we operate.”
If MSU were to place restrictions on its bandwidth, some students said they would be hurt by the limitations, and might even try to go around them.
Alongside his normal computer, Jonathan Sage runs a computer for uploading and downloading music out of his Williams Hall room. He estimates he downloads between 2 and 3 GB of music per week.
“I would probably attempt to break the restrictions if I thought I could get away with it,” the theater junior said. “I don’t really think a bandwidth limit is worthwhile because I think it would limit legitimate network use. But if I was sure I would get caught and there was some sort of penalty, I would most likely not do it.”
Telecommunication senior Shawn Norton uses his Ethernet connection to make his digitally edited videos available anywhere he can access a computer, including video editing labs, such as the Media Interface and Network Design Labs.
“They’re big files, and I have the same setup as they do in the MIND lab, so I can do my work at home and send it to myself,” Norton said.
