IT Milk: entry

I’ve only been on campus for four full days and I already received a bandwidth usage warning from ResCom (residential computing). The funny thing is that I am approaching my bandwidth limit even though I have not downloaded a single torrent or initiated in any P2P activities. By the way, the bandwidth restriction for Penn State University residence halls is a weekly 2 gigabytes download limit.

The following is a table of data sizes to help you understand what we can do with 2 gigabytes of bandwidth:

How much is 2 Gigabytes?	2,000,000,000	2 billion characters
File Type	If average size is	Number of files to equal 2 Gigabytes
Single page text email message	2K	1,000,000
1 page text Excel Spreadsheet	25.5K	78,431
20 page text Word Document	130K	15,384
Medium resolution photograph/graphic file	500K	4,000
High resolution photograph/graphic jpeg file	2.5MB	800
MP3 music file (~5 minutes long)	5MB	400
60 second video clip	10MB	200
Internet Explorer software installation	17MB	117
Movie - DivX format (~2 hours/1 file)	700MB	2.8
Full length DVD movie	4.7GB	0.425

Do you think what I’m doing online shows abnormally high bandwidth usage? Here’s a sum of my daily internet activities:

• Check my email
• Listen to streaming music on Winamp’s Shoutcast Radio
• Check affiliate commission reports
• Refresh search analytics keyword reports every couple of hours for all my sites
• Monitor Google AdWords campaigns
• Manage and create social networks, some duties which require watching Youtube videos as is the case at Tontine

And that’s it. I’m probably one of the lighter bandwidth users on this campus, because the average Penn State student probably downloads a lot of multimedia and sits on Youtube for most of the day.

But I know rules are rules… Unless there is something physically wrong with my computer like a virus sending out massive amounts of data, I have nothing to complain about because this suffering is a university-wide epidemic.

Instead of complaining, I need solutions to optimize my bandwidth usage, which is the goal of PSU ResCom’s bandwidth restriction. But this definitely chops away at the excitement of getting to use a university data backbone, when what you were hyped about while you were in high school was that you get blazing fast connections in your college dorm room. To explain Penn State University’s stinginess on residential internet connections, here is an email reply from the ResCom network coordinator when I asked about why my internet is so damn slow during the day:

The residence halls make up ~ 12% of the population of Penn State. Not regulated, they will consume every bit of bandwidth purchased for everyone, not just residence hall students. They end up wanting even more than we purchase. Since the limits were imposed people conserve more and are able to stay within those limits and the network speed has returned. Even though it is slow sometimes, it is enough to meet the academic need and some recreational need. If students use it more for recreational need instead of academic, they are using the network for the wrong reason.

Here are some alternative actions I must take to avoid receiving another bandwidth violation notice, which would cap my connection at 56k and then I would really go crazy.

1. Use a wireless connection on campus for all my work, where bandwidth is unlimited and the internet speed is amazingly fast. But I would not enjoy leaving the comfort of my home desk and chair.
2. Stop listening to internet radio and watching Youtube videos. The former would cut down on my work efficiency while the latter would interfere with managing my websites.
3. Hack into my neighbors’ wireless access points and rotate using up their bandwidth (haha, jk)

I will have to use a combination of options 1 and 2 until Penn State decides to invest more money into its residential data backbone. I will do all the bandwidth-consuming work on a campus computer or a wireless connection and then return to my sweet home for the rest.