5,800 University Students Kept in the Dark

For the past week, many university-housed students have been experiencing problems and slowdowns with their "Fast" Internet connections. Many have written this off as a glitch in the network that will soon be fixed. These sadly misled souls have not yet been informed by the university's Networking and Telecommunications Services that the cause of this slowdown is no glitch; it's intentional. The following statistics were taken, not from a bulletin sent to the students, but from an internal departmental e-mail acquired from a concerned employee of ADCS (Academic and Distributed Computing Services). This editorial spells out, point by point, the diabolical scheme that NTS has executed while at the same time pulling the wool over the eyes of 5,800 university students.

Last week, NTS implemented the use of a device called "The Packeteer" which imposes large restrictions on the rate that data is transferred between residence halls and the Internet. This restriction is in the form of a 50 Megabit/second cap on bandwidth. Under this new restriction, the 10 university living complexes, housing approximately 5,800 students, share 6.25 megabytes-per-second data transfer capability. Therefore, the more users online at one given time, the slower the network is going to be for each individual user. In theory, if every housing student was transferring data at the same time (in the form of e-mails, file sharing programs, online gaming, etc.), each person would only be connecting at a sadly pre-historic 1.10 KB/Sec (assuming that each student had equal priority bandwidth access). This connection speed would have been surpassed by the dial up modems of 8 years ago.

In light of this very heavy restriction, one would think that NTS would have informed its clientele that it was going to implement this system. Unfortunately, not a word has been said to residents about this and it was only by acquiring an NTS internal e-mail that we were able to find out. In this e-mail, which was written in regards to some of the complaints made by residents, Neil Brock of ADCS told ADCS employees to "Speak of the bandwidth that we are providing rather than the limits that are being added". This suggests that NTS really has no intentions of informing the occupants of the residence halls that the "glitch" they are experiencing will not be fixed anytime soon. If a major internet provider such as America Online or Roadrunner was to impose such suffocating restrictions without informing any of their clients, the response would come, not in the form of an editorial, but a class action lawsuit.

Upon realizing the repercussions of "The Packeteer" many of the students in the residence halls may become a bit disgruntled. This is a matter that should really concern the folks at Housing and Residential Life, considering that a number of students living in the residence halls live there specifically for the fast Internet connections. A lot of them might consider whether or not to return next year when the mailman could deliver their e-mails about as fast as their computer can. We thought that NTS installed the Ethernet in 1999 to increase speeds to the internet, not hinder them. And in addition to adding these restrictions, they have NOT informed us of them. In lieu of the deceptive action taken by NTS, we feel that residence hall students have been wrongfully misled. In an effort to shine the light of truth where a bulb has since been unscrewed, here is a link (http://sdf.lonestar.org/~octal) to a website including the full e-mails that contain the information that NTS has not disclosed to the masses.


Warren M. Blossom, Junior, IT
Dana A. Westlund, Senior, CLA
Jerome W. Odegaard, Junior, IT

notes:

Although the worst case scenario was presented in this letter, we should really be considering the average-case scenario. If we assume that 20% of the bandwidth is being used during peak hours, we see that the effective transfer speed is 5.5 KB/sec (44Kb/sec) per user.

According to ResNet's website, they stipulate that ethernet in the residence halls is "up to 150 times faster than a 56K modem." Generously assuming that 56K dial-up will yield transfer rates in the range of 5KB/sec, this means that ethernet users in the reshalls should be getting up to 5.9 Mb/sec transfer rates. The letter from NTS states that the cap on individual users after implementing "The Packeteer" is 1.2 Mb/sec. 'By implementing this policy, NTS could legally be considered to be guilty of "bait and switch" advertising or something comparable.' (thanks, EC).