Brettia

At Wisconsin, students in university housing are connected to the Internet using a service called ResNet. Generally it is blazing fast: 18 Mbps down and 3 Mbps up. For comparison, decent residential DSL service is usually about 3 Mbps down and 768 Kbps up. This means that in a perfect world I could download an MP3 in about two seconds or a DVD in around an hour. (Of course, most websites are on 100 Mbps connections shared with a bunch of other sites, so real speeds are maybe half that.) That’s pretty awesome, though Internet users in Japan or South Korea would probably laugh at the idea that 18 Mbps is fast in the United States.

One thing that is not awesome, however, is that I am given all this glorious bandwidth with a few caveats. If I exceed 10 GB in any 7-day period, my bandwidth usage gets limited. Severely. It becomes dial-up. I have to turn images off so that pages load faster. Streaming audio and video is impossible. I can’t Skype with my boss in Arizona. I can’t realistically load more than one page at a time in my browser. It’s crippling, and it sucks. The limits come off after a few days of frustration and pain, and then I realize just how different the Internet is with a broadband connection.

Why have a bandwidth cap like this? I would guess that about 50% of ResNet users never come close to exceeding the cap. Things like Facebook, the iTunes Store, and the occasional YouTube video consume next to nothing. Another 25% might use more than 5 GB in a week every once in a while. You could call these people power users, knowledgable users, but not exactly hard-core users. Another 20% are in the category I’m in: they’re deeply interested in technology and the Internet, and always on the hunt for high-bandwidth content (and I don’t necessarily mean illegal stuff - even tech-unsavvy students have discovered the awesome HD episodes of LOST on ABC’s website). Along with using Skype, the iTunes Store, ABC.com, YouTube, and NFL SuperCast (last semester), I download Linux distros from time to time, new software or updates to installed apps, and large files related to my job. There is probably no day in which I use less than 500 MB of bandwidth. Multiply that by seven days, and I’m up to 3.5 GB of bandwidth per week no matter what. In a heavy-traffic week I might hit 15 GB.

But that is nothing compared to the final 5%’s bandwidth needs, the users who work with scientific data or produce video or download a lot of movies and music over BitTorrent. The majority of these people are probably abusing the network, and the bandwidth caps are in place because of them. At Case Western Reserve University, which my friend Garrett Singer attends, it was found in 2006 that 34 students were consuming 73% of the bandwidth allocated to all students living in residence halls on campus. That’s pretty insane, and it’s no wonder Wisconsin uses caps to thwart these kinds of users.

However, 10 GB is too low. According to the ResNet bandwidth usage policy, 10 GB is “a very large amount of data.” It was a very large amount of data. Two years ago 10 GB would’ve be fine. But online video has exploded over that period, as has VoIP calling (sometimes with video). Considering that the 18 Mbps connection speed is a tad excessive currently, it doesn’t seem like it would be such a big deal to lower the speed a bit and increase the cap to 20-25 GB. Then, people in the power user group would have more than enough bandwidth (you could sit on your computer for every waking hour and download 200 MB each hour continuously without breaking 25 GB).

As it is, the cap is annoying and inconvenient, but not impossible to work with. You can reset your usage total twice each semester (I used both resets and got throttled once last semester), and with time you get skilled at keeping yourself just under the cap. I cannot imagine what it would’ve been like last year though, when the cap was at 5 GB. I would’ve died.

Feesh.

Update: Two days after posting this I learned that the bandwidth quotas had been removed! Crazy.