Network policy changes: Bandwidth restrictions cut

On Wednesday, March 26, the Rose-Hulman Instructional, Administrative, and Information Technology (IAIT) Technical Services Center suspended the enforcement of the student download/upload quota policy. The former policy allowed students to download or upload up to three gigabytes of information over a 24-hour period or five gigabytes over three days. If a student exceeded these limits, their bandwidth use was restricted. The new system allows students to share available bandwidth without a limit. Sophomore chemical engineering major Brianna Butchart stated, "I'm going to miss laughing at people on 56K." IAIT and the Academic Technology Committee approved the change in policy on Monday, March 24, 2008. A statement e-mailed to IAIT employees from IAIT administrators explained: "It is our belief, and that of the Academic Technology Committee members, that this change will be beneficial to residential students."

Stephen Jones, the Associate Vice President of IAIT and Chief Systems Architect, explained why the policy was changed: "There were students, some who legitimately exceeded those limits for academic use. There's also the increased prevalence of multimedia available to students via the Internet. The IAIT staff, especially the media staff, in looking at the quotes and the number of students being subjected to rate limiting, we thought that removing the quota enforcement would make the network more usable for the residential students." Jones also explained how much bandwidth is available for student use: "During the workday the residence halls are allotted a minimum of 15 megabits per second. Outside of normal work hours, the students have access to everything that is available except for bandwidth allocated to the library and IAIT." Rose-Hulman's total Internet bandwidth is 45 megabits per second. The limits established for peer-to-peer networking are not affected by the suspension of the quota policy because these limits are covered under a separate policy. The new policy also does not apply to the limits placed on classrooms and laboratories and does not affect faculty and staff because they were never included under the old policy.

After a week with the new policy, one restriction was added. Jones stated, "Some students were uploading excessively to the Internet, we came back and added a 512 kilobits per second maximum for uploads." When asked about the success of the new policy, Jones said, "With just a couple of weeks, one which all of the students were gone, I think it is too early to say whether it was successful or not. The goal is to make the campus a better place for the students who live here."

The goal is to make the campus a better place for the students who live here.

Many students are concerned about their classmates abusing the new system. Freshman civil engineering major Jessica Honegger stated, "No wonder my Internet access suddenly slowed down to the speed of a caveman writing with a hammer and a chisel!" Paul Banister, a sophomore computer science major, added, "It's lag-tastic." Jones stated, "I think based on e-mail we've seen from some students, that they think the campus was better off without the quotas. We are still monitoring how much students are uploading and downloading to the Internet. If it continues to be an issue and if the consensus from the students is that it was better off with the quotas, we will look at reestablishing the quotas and changing the quotas if they are put back." He added, "It is a small number of students that are abusing the uploading and downloading. We considered that this could happen when we were debating it. The feeling among all of us is that the students were responsible enough that this would be a positive change rather than having to enforce responsible behavior."