robbdn

You've got only 25 megabits for 1200 students living on campus? That's insane! If they were all using computers at the same time, that's only 2.5k per student... even at a more realistic only 25% using at the same time that's only 10k. I hope you meant 25MB, that would at least guarantee 80k/sec at 25% usage...

I would be complaining that the network is slow too if I couldn't even break 100k/sec reliably... I'm used to speeds from 5-6MB/sec on campus.

This is really debatable, and one of the most frustrating things about campus IT departments. Just imagine if campus libraries started sticking their noses into how many books you copy, and whether or not you're actually following fair use copyright laws? Just imagine if they suddenly decided they had the right to know what you were reading and restrict your access to it because you "read too much."

I am very aware that most colleges and universities underfund their IT departments, and I think it's a crime, but taking a totalitarian approach isn't going to make IT departments more respected in an academic environment, and may even make some administrators less likely to fund a department with these kinds of policies. It's true, that technically the students haven't got a legal right to privacy on a campus network, but they certainly have an academic right to it as demonstrated by library networks worldwide for centuries. Privacy must be respected, and so must a students right to access the internet to the best of their ability.

I also understand that universities are worried about lawsuits related to copyright infringement and investigations. But really, this only becomes a problem when a student is using campus resources to distribute copyrighted, or otherwise illegal, materials. A university that simply allows students to download whatever they want and respect their privacy never needs to worry about facing a lawsuit directly, it isn't their fault that the student used their resources in the way they did. This is, again, exactly the same as library policies on copying books in the library. Everybody knows you're not supposed to do it, but they provide the facilities and everybody does it anyway. How do they justify it? Well, there is the outside possibility that the library patron is following fair use, and it's really not the library's place to stick their nose into what the student is copying in the first place. Fair use does still apply in the digital world, even with the DMCA, and provides the legal justification for allowing students the facilities to do these things. After all, I can, technically, copy a portion of a video game or a movie, digitally, for use in an academic paper or a presentation in a classroom.

Interesting... 90,000 really isn't a lot to work with. At my university, all students pay the fee, not just on campus students. That might be something worth looking into doing to get extra funding, I don't think students generally mind paying for the kind of service they want. Ours is $100 per quarter, $400 per year, for each and every student, not just on campus, and while the students always find fees to complain about I can never recall a major complaint being made about the technology fees.

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I'm swimming in the digital residue of a media-drenched world. It's too cold.