By Chris Ulicne,
Photographer

Resident students at Seton Hill University (SHU) are now surfing the Internet at higher speeds than ever before, thanks to a bandwidth increase for the school’s computer network.

“It does seem to go a little bit faster,” said Marchae Peters, a sophomore resident of Brownlee Hall.

Before the increase occurred, one computer network was dedicated to student-owned computers in residence halls, and a different network was dedicated to SHU classrooms, labs, and offices. The Computer and Information Technologies Department (CIT), with the cooperation of Penn Telecom and Comcast Corporation, combined the two previously separate computer networks at SHU into a common, internal network at an unspecified time around September 22, 2005.

According to Fred Billman, executive director of CIT, the old bandwidth speed was 1.5 Mbps for uploading and downloading files on all computers connected to the Internet through the SHU network.

The increase boosted upload speeds to 11 Mbps and download speeds to 17 Mbps.

The Internet Service Providers (ISPs) set no bandwidth cap. However, Billman said that the CIT Department wanted to make gradual increases. He said that the department’s budget, currently set at $0.5 million, has had an effect on SHU’s bandwidth purchases.

“It’s like a management game,” said Billman. “We’re pretty comfortable.”

Although all types of computers, including PCs and Macs, can achieve the same bandwidth speeds through the newly updated network, not all computers on campus can take advantage of them yet.

The CIT Department added all student-owned computers in residence halls to the new master system for the network, but classrooms, labs, and offices have not been added to it.

Billman said that once the other computers have been moved into the new network system, the total available Internet bandwidth will be distributed across the user base according to “academic need and the time of day.”

At night, when most of the computers in offices and classrooms are no longer being used, the bandwidth for residence hall computers will increase. But during the day, when the offices and classrooms are in use, the bandwidth for residence hall computers will be lowered to accommodate the extra pull on resources.

Billman said that abuse of the bandwidth could also slow the network down. “Its prime purpose is for academics,” Billman said. He said that university management objectives also take priority.
Brian Dawson, CIT network coordinator, said that users who try to disguise their actions on the network could create a problem.

According to Dawson, the software used to manage the allocation of bandwidth resources across the network might see through such disguises and mistakenly classify legitimate types of network traffic as security threats. This would slow down all normal traffic that falls under that category, even if it is classified as academic activity.

“It’s pretty obvious when someone does that,” said Dawson. “If there is a lot of traffic, I’ll look into it and see where it’s coming from and where it’s going.”

Activities such as downloading audio and video for personal entertainment, file-sharing, and playing online games present other problems, but according to Billman, there may be ways to solve some of them.

Billman said that Comcast has described a portfolio of options which could be introduced at SHU in order to provide a legitimate file-sharing service to interested students at a “nominal cost per student.” No agreement has been made.

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