What or who is slowing down the campus Internet again?

The slow campus Internet has again become an issue for both the students and the administration. Archive photo.

BY NOAH PAPPANO

All over campus you can hear students complaining about the slow Internet. For some, it can take as much as three to five minutes for their e-mail to load and much longer for a .pdf file or a video streaming site. The administration is aware of this problem. In fact, they are actively monitoring it and researching solutions.

Don Williams, Manager of IT and Nework Services, as well as the man who implemented the IT program on campus 11 years ago, and Paul Millette, Director of Library, IT Services, & Learning Support Services at Griswold Library, have been very active on this issue.

GMC subscribes to two different IP accounts, one being ResNet, which hosts residence halls. For the past two years, the school has blocked what other colleges have identified as heavy bandwidth users. “In the library, we’ve blocked sites such as Napster, MySpace, FaceBook,” said Millette.

Another reason for site-blocking was the library staff were seeing students waiting in line behind FaceBook users, checking their homepages. “We’ve done this to keep the library true to its purpose of academic study,” noted Millette. This is actually being seen as a national trend among colleges.

Peer-to-peer file-sharing services are also being blocked. With these programs, the problem is that as long as you are online, the program is online and actively streaming, which eats up bandwidth. “We have plenty of outgoing bandwidth. The trouble is incoming. Streaming is hurting us,” said Don Williams.

With students remembering bandwidth being fine last year, what happened this year that changed? On top of the increase in users and video streaming sites, Williams had much to say about how the landscape of the Internet has changed in the past six months to a year. Social sites such as FaceBook and YouTube have what is known as dynamic content—a sophisticated technology that basically means moving commercials which continually use bandwidth. The thing to remember is that a streaming site is constantly streaming. By leaving the computer on, the incoming bandwidth is being filled up and clogs the campus Internet.

A few sites figured prominently as being the heaviest bandwidth users, like Napster, MySpace, YouTube, FaceBook, and ITunes. The last two have been receiving the most activity on campus. “This year has seen more Mac users with ITunes,” said Williams. The problem is further exacerbated by Internet accessing machines.

“More Xbox, PS2, Wii machines. More residents filled out forms for these than any other year. We have more users this year and they’re more sophisticated than ever before,” Williams noted.

Before fall break, an all-time record of 616 users logged on. On the Wednesday after break, only 400 were logged on, which meant adequate bandwidth campus-wide.

“It’s a two-old question,” said Williams. “You can’t just increase capacity without looking at the activity.”

“We’ve been in contact with the Provost, the President, and been told to do more exploration. We’ve been in contact with other colleges, other vendors, considered options,” said Millette. “We even considered re-engineering ResNet,” added Williams. “But with the way it’s structured now, there’s really no advantage in that.”

Student Senate will be launching a Log Off Campaign to increase on-campus awareness. “The Log Off Campaign isn’t addressing how students use computers, but asking them to turn them off when they leave their rooms to open bandwidth and save energy,” said Kyle O’Boyle, Director of IT for Student Senate.

The campaign came about through a meeting with the IT Department which identified certain auto-updating sites as being the primary sinkholes of bandwidth on campus. Such culprits as FaceBook and Gmail contributed significantly to ResNet bandwidth being maxed out from 1PM until the evening hours. The campaign is not an ambitious one, but purposefully designed with an easy goal in mind. “The campaign is specifically for students to shut off their computers, and additionally to free up bandwidth,” O’Boyle said.

Part of O’Boyle’s hope is that students will ultimately become more aware that computers use a lot of energy, which, from a conservation standpoint, it makes sense to log-off when you leave the room. “What we’re addressing here is people who are always logged-on,” noted O’Boyle.

The problem is a knotty one, with faculty, staff, and students needing to practice more awareness of how they’re using their computers, while also understanding the shifting landscape of the Internet.

“One of the heavy users is NetFlix,” Millette said. “Let’s say you start downloading a movie at four o’clock so it’s ready to watch at 10; that consumes more bandwidth than opening up a PDF file. At least a thousand times more.”

“Network and bandwidth is a shared resource,” Millette added, “and it’s limited.” An example of this is when one goes to open a JStor PDF file, which should open in a minute or two—not eight. The library could flex more of an iron will, but chooses to try and work with the school community by building awareness and conducting more research on solutions. “In the res halls, our history has been not to block.” said Millette. “We understand living in a small town, entertainment is a huge thing. Streaming on your computer may be the only source of entertainment.”

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Posted by Noah Pappano on Oct 30, 2009 Filed under College. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry