On Wed, 21 Mar 2001, Shelley Henderson wrote:
> Just a quick response from somebody who IS working at a university: we
> ARE looking at longterm solutions... but we don't have either the
> solution or the funding for the solution in place yet. Meantime, our
> students came back from Christmas vacation and dang near maxed out our
> connection to the Internet.
And this is even more difficult at smaller institutions like ours, which
can only afford 2 T1s, each of which is TOTALLY maxed out 20 hours a day
by student use, even with somewhat aggressive 'throttling'.
> The students' desire to use P2P should not -- NOT -- overwhelm the
> other legitimate uses of the Internet by other students, by faculty,
> and by staff.
I would be more sympathetic to arguments about enabling creativity and
unlocking potential, etc. etc., if I didn't know for a fact that well over
80% (perhaps 90%) of the bandwidth was being used for downloading images, music
and movies which impede rather than assist the intellectual task. Where is
the killer p2p ACADEMIC application? When (if) that comes about, I can argue
before the budget comittee for putting in an OC-3, but until then, I haven't
a leg to stand on, and I must filter, throttle, shut down, limit, slash and
any other negative verb I can come up with, simply to survive - to be able
to have this email go through in a reasonable amount of time.
John Rodkey
No, I'm not bitter... :)
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