Friday, September 7, 2001

Video Downloads Swamp Computer Network in U. of Delaware's Dorms By SCOTT CARLSON Technology managers at the University of Delaware had a rude awakening this week, when the computer network in the residential halls saw its heaviest traffic ever. Internet access for the 7,500 students living there -- many of them freshmen -- ground to a halt. University officials suspect that students who download movies are the culprits. Although Delaware has in the past advocated an educational approach to bandwidth management, university officials plan to limit downloads starting next week. "We have problems with certain students downloading 19 gigabytes of stuff," Susan J. Foster, the university's vice president for information technologies, says with some exasperation. "What is a student doing to download 19 gigabytes? What is that -- the entire Library of Congress? It makes us think that it's video." While some other universities imposed broad network limits during the Napster craze, Delaware stuck to a simple policy of educating students about good network citizenship. Under the policy, students are required to pass a test with questions about network ethics and copyright issues before getting network access. The university dealt with select, egregious bandwidth busters by shutting off their Internet access and lecturing them about the rules of network use. The educational programs will remain, Ms. Foster says, but the university will add a downloading limit of one gigabyte per student per day. "We're in the process of putting this out in the next few days as a new policy," she says. "This is something that we've always known that we were going to have to do eventually, but we felt that part of the educational experience at Delaware is to learn Internet and electronic citizenship." Ms. Foster says that this year's network-traffic jam is a sure sign that university technology managers have headaches ahead of them, even in a post-Napster world. "We believe this tells us something about our freshmen -- how different our freshman class is from last year's. It gives us the picture that the problem is escalating and that we have to do something to set limits." Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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