In addition to the usual takeout food menus slipped under dorm room doors, students living on campus received a leaflet from a different kind of solicitor late last week - Tufts Online. The flier represents the second part of a two-prong approach to improve the speed of the Internet connection in the dormitories, which has been the subject of much complaint this semester.
The one page sheet entitled, "Bandwidth Bandits" explained how to disable Napster from serving up music files to the software's 20 million users worldwide. Napster and other such programs that facilitate mp3 trading are responsible for the dramatic slowdown of the Internet in the dorms that has occurred this year.
A technical attempt to increase the actual speed of the connection was made two weeks ago by Tufts Computing and Communications Services (TCCS), which is responsible for Tufts' network. The network is divided so that a certain amount of bandwidth, or capacity of Tufts' Internet connection, is allocated to the dorms and a certain amount to faculty, staff, and administrative offices. TCCS programmed routers to dramatically reduce the size of the Internet connection for faculty and staff at night, giving the capacity instead to the dorms.
Tufts officials maintain that the bandwidth in dorms alone is now equal to the bandwidth for the entire University last year. However, Manger of Networks and Special Projects Marj Minnigh said that the increased capacity is still not meeting the demands of users.
"Many students have wondered why we can't just go back to the way it was last year. We can't because the demand is just too overwhelming," she said. "If we were to lift the subnet limits, then one single machine, badly configured and sharing music, could hog the entire Internet link."
In order to remedy this, TCCS officials are attempting to reduce the traffic over Tufts Internet connection by decreasing the amount of outbound traffic. By default, Napster makes a student's entire music collection available for download by other Napster users around the world. They hope that with the leaflet, students will learn that they can help to reduce the network congestion.
"The biggest issue of bandwidth 'over-use' is the searches coming in to campus from the Internet, which means that Napster... [is] doing massive amounts of searching of the Tufts network," Minnigh said. "We also think that if students know that their unintentional sharing is causing a great deal of the network congestion, that they will be good citizens and shut down when they are not using the computer."
Wednesday through Friday of last week, Residential Computer Consultants - students hired by the school to help other students connect their computers to the network - went through the dorms, delivering the 3,400 leaflets and answering questions about Internet usage.
Minnigh said that while the technical changes have helped, Napster use continues to dominate Internet traffic and slow the network. "Some students have perceived an improvement. We can see that the Napster... traffic immediately fills the added bandwidth by about five minutes after the time change every night," she said.
Students say that the rerouting has made a difference, but they are still not satisfied with the network speed. "Usually I would sit here and wait for about 30 or 45 seconds before my page would come up, now it's like ten or 15 [seconds]. I've noticed a significant change in the speed that my web page will come up," said freshman Tim Mack, a resident of Carmichael Hall.
"[The Internet] is significantly slower than last year and I'm not sure why... I had to write a paper and I went to the Tisch website and it definitely made it more difficult to do research through the Internet. I was able to do it, it just took a much longer time," sophomore Dan Kalik said.
After this dramatic restructuring of the network had little impact, TCCS is doubtful that it can ever meet the demand of students for sharing mp3s. "I think the demand for file sharing is probably not a demand we can meet," Minnigh said. "It's not the demand of the 3,300 on-campus students, it's the demand of the 20 million Napster users."
Minnigh said that no matter what her charts tell her about the Internet speed and usage, what matters most is student satisfaction. In addition to educating students on responsible Internet use, TCCS hopes to work with the TCU Senate or a similar organization that can represent the student body to educate students and enhance Internet performance. Such a partnership would also enable TCCS to obtain student feedback about network services on campus.
