Why Penn State’s Bandwidth Limitation Sucks

State of Technology As Penn State students, we are very familiar with the bandwidth limitation. The 4 gigabyte a week download/4 gigabyte a week upload limit is something that I truly hate.
What Penn State fails to realize is that now more than ever, the internet is for fun as well as work. As a hardcore gamer, I am frequently downloading new patches and mods for my games. Some of these may take up to half of my bandwidth! Several services, the most popular of which being Steam, by Valve Corporation, allow people to buy games legally and easily over the internet. Unfortunately, I can’t take advantage of this great service due to the restriction on bandwidth.

YouTube is now offering videos in High Quality and HD, and Hulu legally features many of my favorite shows. Because of this, many students have also been streaming more videos than ever before. But of course, since ResCom wants to hold our internet hostage, we have to limit viewing.
Of course, during the day, it is hard to download much of anything anyway, since the internet is often much slower than dial-up. This not only slows downloads that are for fun, but also makes it nearly impossible to access class materials.

It seems, from both experience and reading the FAQ on the bandwidth limitation, that the main problem with the internet here is the infrastructure is not good enough. Penn State may be in a financial crunch right now, but with this infrastructure problem being the way it has been for years, there is no excuse that they couldn’t have already made upgrades. Networking equipment has been cheap for years.

Penn State needs to get with the times and remove the bandwidth limitation. If that involves upgrading existing infrastructure, so be it. Come on Graham, our endowment may not be as big as it was a year ago, but spending a tiny fraction of it to better our internet service would be well worth it for anyone who lives on campus. Until they do that, living on campus will always be less than ideal to me. Please Penn State, free the internet!

Thanks for reading the first installment of State of Technology. I promise that future installments will be less editorial and rant-like.

http://onwardstate.com/members/steve/ Steve S.

We have the pipes for higher speed connections to the dorms, but the bandwidth is expensive. My biggest problem lies with the throttling from 11AM-5PM. The theory is that the majority of the bandwidth goes towards research and classrooms during that time. I can understand that they would want to limit the bandwidth during the day, but why does it have to be as slow as it is. Yesterday, I couldn’t even send an attachment via Gmail, it got timed out. The file was only 5MB.
http://www.onwardstate.com Davis

I would really like Penn State to implement a system for bandwidth similar to the existing system for printing.

Penn State should give students a subsidized amount of bandwidth– 4 gb as it is now would be fine– but then give students the option to buy additional bandwidth.
Roland

You kids are lucky. Back in my first year, the bandwidth cap was at 2GB per week. I can see the problem with gamers, especially online gamers (which is why you always see someone locking themselves in one of the quiet rooms in Atherton and Simmons, wearing big headphones, using wireless – goddamn I hate VPN gateway – to play World of Warcraft), but the fact is that Penn State campus simply too big to go through a huge network renovation. They won’t even put wireless in our dorms because it’s too expensive.

But if you do need to download something large, you can go to the computer lab, look up the IPv4 connection on a connected computer there, apply that same setting to your laptop, and just connect the ethernet cable to the laptop. True, you can’t leave your laptop there to download while you go to classes, but at least it’s faster than wireless and it’s not using your own bandwidth.

Next time, maybe you can rant about how they haven’t updated MS Office on the Macs yet, so that students STILL can’t open .docx files on them. Sure, I could move right next me to a PC and open it, but 1. I hate Dells, 2. I hate getting interrupted and having to get up and start up another computer, and 3. I really really hate Dells.
Robert

Oddly enough, I am downloading something right now (a trailer for an upcoming video game) and getting over 850 kb/s.

This is coming after I went over my 4 GB limit yesterday, so I should be speed limited. If anything, seems like they unlimited me.
Elly Okkelberg

If you need to download a large file, you could use wireless on a laptop or use a computer lab, transfer the file to a flash drive and go about it that way. I just got a 8GB flash drive for $25 over break. Since the limit just rose from 2GBs to 4GBs per week, I don’t see it changing for a while.

If you really cared, ask around enough people, I know some were able to go around the limitations on the bandwidth usage outright…

If you have other specific complaints, SACITS is the student advisory committee to ITS. Through UPUA, I sit on this board, though it’s open to anyone. It’s held once or twice a semester on a Friday night so that CCSG may be in attendance.
http://www.rescom.psu.edu 1337

I preface this by stating that I used to work for rescom and I graduated within the last 3 years..

Just so you know, Rescom doesn’t do anything to you…they are just a bunch of dorks just like you trying to earn some extra cash. The university, housing, board of trustees and Spanier are all directly involved in the policy making process, so…be nice to the Rescom.

The bandwidth limitations were created back around 2000ish because 5% of the student population was using 99% of the university’s bandwidth. This ensured that everyone had equal access to the bandwidth and that speeds would be constant.

Also, PSU was one of the first major universities to have a high speed wired connection for each student in the dorms. Unfortunately, this also means that they were also running on old technology fairly shortly following that. Upgrades have been continuous, but when you have 23,000+ student and 10,000+ academic connections to deal with, the process is slow and expensive.

I wouldn’t try and circumvent security and firewall protocols in the dorms either. When you signed up for your connection you pretty much signed over saying that if you did anything of that nature they could take away your connection (wired and wireless) permanently.

I recommend moving off campus. I hated the bandwidth limitations and off campus was much nicer; however, most ISPs are now implementing their own daily or monthly throttling or bandwidth caps…so you’re kinda screwed either way.

Regardless, if you want to have fun at State (both online and socially), move off campus…but if you haven’t figured that out yet, you’re probably a loser anyway.