University restricts download speeds

Academic material loads faster than entertainment

Ashley Gaboury, volunteer staff

Downloading movies and music takes longer at the U of M than at students’ homes, thanks to restrictions put in place by the university's Information Services and Technology office.

The U of M constantly monitors campus computer network traffic to detect movie and music downloads from file-sharing programs and restricts the connection speed to ensure that teaching and research-related downloads can be obtained quickly, according to Gerry Miller, executive director of Information Services and Technology (IST).

If downloads are occurring at a time when the network is busy downloading priority material related to teaching and research, then the bandwidth (the speed of data transfer) is limited to traffic pertaining to massive file-sharing. In other words, the connection speed is slowed down significantly.

George Siemens, associate director of the Learning Technologies Centre, said that it is best to treat bandwidth as the size of a pipe.

“If you have a large pipe, you can put more stuff through . . . it’s just a matter of how much information can the university’s Internet structure handle at a particular time.”

“Certainly once people start downloading . . . entire movies, which can be a gigabyte or more in size compared with 24 kilobits for a webpage, there is a significant bandwidth issue.”

The U of M has a theoretical bandwidth on campus of 100 megabits per second to each desktop machine, according to Miller.

“At home on a cable modem there might be four [megabits per second]. . . . DSL might be two [megabits per second],” said Miller.

Miller emphasized the fact that the university limits only a very specific type of traffic, which is not as important to the university as other time-sensitive traffic.

“Downloading a movie is less important. First of all, if you download a movie, you should make sure you’re allowed to do that. Secondly, you can wait for it,” said Miller.

“There is a lot of other traffic that we can’t [wait for]. Our priority is teaching and research.”

According to Miller, the university’s campus network has two connections. The first is for off-campus connections for commercial Internet sites and the second is for research across Canada.

Both the general campus network and physically separate residence network are monitored for certain types of file-sharing. There is equipment used to monitor the type of traffic coming in but not the content.

“It’s not illegal and it is possible [to monitor content], but we don’t do it,” said Miller.

“There is certain traffic that we know that we can look for. If the network’s not busy, then so what? If the network is busy with other use [related to teaching and research], then we limit [that certain traffic]. We don’t block it . . . it takes longer.”

Miller said that every university does the same type of monitoring and limiting of bandwidth and that the U of M has been involved in this type of network monitoring for a number of years.

“We’re not the only university, everybody does it,” he said. “[We been monitoring the traffic] for a number of years. It’s just a fact of life.”

Siemens said that in the last five years there has been dramatic change in the information available on the Internet.

Siemens said that universities in the United States have implemented filtering policies similar to the U of M in response to lawsuits filed against them by the Recording Industry Association of America for student downloads of pirated music.

“With the rise in the development of those kinds of legal liabilities, universities are put in a position where they have to be aware of how their network policies relate to legal or ethical issues.”

Siemens said that the U of M’s filtering process is effective from the perspective of protecting the university from liability issues and ensuring a certain degree of quality by minimizing downloads.

Jessica Trent, a second-year science student, who lives in residence and uses the Internet to download a variety of things, including lecture notes, said that her residence Internet has been disconnected multiple times.

“They don’t just slow you down, they kick you right off.”

Trent said that when her Internet connection stopped working at the beginning of the school year she called the helpline she was directed to for Internet problems.

“They said that basically [I had] been downloading things [I] shouldn’t be, so they blocked me off the network. I got kicked right off the network, so I didn’t even have a computer to download my class notes for a few days.”

Trent said there are many problems with the residence Internet.

“If it’s working, it’s barely working. It’s horrible.”

After being disconnected, Trent stopped downloading music but she continued to use the Internet to download class lecture notes. Once again she was disconnected.

“I had to phone again . . . and explain that it was my notes that I was uploading onto my computer for my classes. They said that [the system] was showing I had been downloading too much.”

Trent also said that each time her Internet was disconnected she was told she would have to wait a certain number of days before she could be reconnected.

“They don’t notify you about [being disconnected]. I have had more than one friend who has been kicked off for downloading.”

At press time, Miller could not be contacted to comment on Trent’s situation.