Some students living on Grounds have received automated e-mails this semester from ITC warning them to reduce the amount of data generated and received by their computers over the University network.
"Some students don't even realize that they are using that much bandwidth," ITC Network Systems Manager Robin Ruggaber said.
ITC tracks the IP addresses that students use to register their computers in order to warn individual students who exceed their allotted amount of bandwidth.
Bandwidth is a data transmission rate, the maximum amount of information (bits/second) that can be transmitted along a channel, according to the Computer User High-Tech Dictionary online.
ITC's mission is to give priority to those using the Internet for on-Grounds resources, and second to those browsing the Web, using AOL Instant Messenger and similar programs, said Jim Jokl, ITC communications and systems division director.
"The change should only affect people who are using extraordinary amounts of bandwidth for downloading music and movies," Ruggaber said.
The e-mail warnings said that ITC will limit network access to students whose computers do not resolve their bandwidth usage problems.
ITC officials currently are developing a long-term plan to penalize those who do not comply, Jokl said.
After receiving several complaints from students on Grounds last semester regarding Internet speed, ITC began to investigate the problem and realized that the program responsible for prioritizing Web usage was broken. Therefore, students who were using large amounts of bandwidth were allowed to take priority over those who needed to send e-mail or search the Internet, Jokl said.
The program broke after ITC upgraded some of its core infrastructure network equipment last summer. This failure allowed 2 percent of students to use over 50 percent of capacity and 5 percent of students to use 72 percent of the available bandwidth on a given day, he said.
Such a high volume of Internet traffic can be caused by downloading music or movies, and some viruses can also make a single computer dominate Internet bandwidth as well.
In December, ITC purchased new hardware to correct the traffic-shaping problem.
"The new hardware has the system working back in correlation with the announced policies, before we updated this summer," Jokl said.
Ruggaber said students have responded favorably since the problem was fixed.
Second-year College student and Gooch-Dillard resident Erin Fromherz said she has not noticed a change.
"I use i-Tunes and there have always been times when the connection is slower, usually at night," Fromherz said.
The competition for bandwidth is responsible for slowing down access to the Internet. Ruggaber said without a functioning throttling mechanism one or two students could potentially use up all of the bandwidth.
ITC officials said those students who consume large amounts of bandwidth will be the ones who experience the greatest change in Internet speed.
Second-year Engineering student and Gooch-Dillard resident Ewen Cheslack-Posava said he occasionally has to make large file transfers online and has received an automated warning e-mail.
"If anything, it has gotten worse since Winter Break," Cheslack-Posava said. "I think the transfers have begun to go a lot slower."
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