U. caps bandwidth, causing slowdowns

Due to an increase in computer music and movie-sharing among students, Penn has instituted caps on all outbound traffic, limiting the speeds with which users can share files with the outside world.

Penn Information Systems and Computing started putting upload caps into place last Wednesday in all college houses. Transfer speeds in other Penn academic buildings, labs and libraries have not been affected.

According to Michael Palladino, associate vice president of networking and telecommunications, the cap was put into place because of the increasing burden dorm computer users were placing on the Penn network.

"A fifth of the total users were consuming over two-thirds, almost all of the total bandwidth," Palladino said. "We want to keep PennNet for academic pursuits."

"The effort is meant at protecting our ability to deliver good service to the entire Penn community," he added.

As a result, 160 of Penn's 255 megabyte bandwidth capacity has been allocated to college houses and divided among all the buildings.

According to Palladino, Penn increased its total capacity from 135 megabytes last spring, but the limit was reached soon after the upgrade.

Currently, it costs Penn over $1 million a year to maintain Internet service and the University does not have additional money and resources to increase capacity.

While external outbound communication will be limited, downloading and traffic within the internal Penn network will not be affected.

Though most students felt that the cap was understandable, they were upset by the lack of student consultation.

"They should have consulted the entire student body rather than flipping the switch all of a sudden," College freshman Ryan Haney said.

Palladino admitted that ISC "dropped the ball," but added the office is "continually re-evaluating this" and will hold upcoming meetings with Residential Computing staff.

The cap will hit Haney hard, as he uses the Penn network to place long distance calls over the Internet to family and friends. The current measures will cause Haney to incur higher long-distance phone charges.

He said Penn could have thought of other ways to limit outbound traffic, including limiting the transfer speeds of specific file types such as MP3 files, as other schools have done.

Information Technology Advisors have also been hearing assorted complaints from residents.

"We've had some complaints and we've basically been telling people to limit their file-sharing to improve the collective performance," said Hill House ITA Manager Howard Vegter, an Engineering sophomore.

And Engineering sophomore Alex Eames said he has been dissatisfied with his Internet service since the cap was instituted.

"I've experienced slower Web-surfing and all users have been urged to cut back" by ITAs, Eames said.

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