Why is campus internet so slow?

As many of you are probably aware, the internet in the residence halls has been  crawling along lately.

As someone who thrives on funny cat videos and video games, I took matters into my own hands and decided to investigate why the internet had turned to crap.

Before mid-term break, the internet was running perfectly fine. I could get on YouTube and Steam and my games would download in about five seconds on a good day. However, the wireless internet was still very slow. I attribute a lot of that to freshman trying to use Netflix like crazy.

After we all came back from mid-term break, the internet was slow. And I mean SLOW. YouTube videos took a good hour to load in the lowest quality, and if you were trying to watch anything on Hulu, good luck. You will be graduated by the time your Saturday Night Live clips load.

I was fed up with it, and I contacted the IT department. I originally went over to Miller Hall to their offices to complain a little bit, but they were closing, and I was told to come back later.

I forgot about it until I was in the library this past week, when I walked up to the IT Help Desk and complained about slow internet. The nice lady working the desk told me they would be happy to help me, and decided to send tech support right up to my room.

I arrived before the support guys did to make sure my room didn’t look like a death trap. Ten minutes later, I heard a knock on the door.

It wasn’t just one guy, there were three people there to look and see why my internet was so slow. As we were talking, they told me that they have a thing set up on the campus internet to direct traffic flow as they see fit.

Basically, they prioritize certain connections while they let other ones run slower. The system is currently set up to make sure that campus websites, such as Sakai, MyCSC, and EagleMail are getting the right amount of bandwidth allocated, while other connections, such as YouTube and Netflix, are given less priority.

I can understand why the IT department would do this; it’s essential that we keep Sakai and the like up and running.

However, I pay a lot of money to go to school here, and I’m probably going to keep paying the school a ton of money to stay here for the next three years. If I’m going to be killing my bank account, I would at least like to watch “Tim and Eric Awesome Show: Great Job” while doing it.

I was originally very bitter about the entire situation, I’m glad the IT guys were willing to work with me and shed some light on the situation at hand, and they did let me know they are trying to fix the problem. In the end, give it a couple weeks and everything will probably be fine. Until then, we will all have to deal with incredibly pixelated cat videos.