According to the message, the College's Internet connection is frequently filled to capacity due to an increase in the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing programs like the popular BitTorrent. Students use these programs to download large music and video files. As a result of the increased download volume, students and professors using the Internet for academic reasons have been hindered. "Faculty have found that access to the Internet is unreliable during the day when they are teaching classes," said Schilling.
While the College community has witnessed the results of the Internet saturation, few realized that Amherst's Internet connection was subject to similar limitations as Internet connections at their homes. Though much larger than household connections, the College's network also has a limit. According to Schilling, 100-200 computers-the vast majority of which are on the dormitory portion of the network-are continuously downloading content from P2P protocols, and the traffic is occupying much of the College's bandwidth. Bandwidth refers to the amount of data that can be transmitted in a certain amount of time. Currently, Amherst has a connection of 21 Mbps (megabits per second), which costs the College about $9,300 per month. This is not enough bandwidth to prevent saturation of the Internet connection, however. "Monday afternoon, for example, over 25 percent of our bandwidth [was] consumed this way," said Schilling.
After discovering the cause of the lagging Internet connection on campus, many students suspected that content increases on the "Scratch Drive" were to blame. Scratch is a server on the College's network that is open for storage and viewing by all network computers. Though use of the server has increased dramatically lately, Scratch-related traffic is internal to the Amherst network, which Schilling assures has "plenty of capacity." Still, Schilling says the Scratch server is a problem of its own.
"Although the Scratch server is an academic resource, we are under the impression that, at times, one or more students may have used it as an anonymous repository for video and audio files," said Schilling. "These files are being used without permission in violation of copyright. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the College may be liable for this material. As a result, IT will change the way the Scratch server operates," he said.
But one student, who wished to remain anonymous, sees Scratch as a solution rather than a problem. "While illegal downloading is probably going to happen regardless of what measures the IT department takes, the Scratch drive can prevent redundant downloading," suggested the student. "When 50 people are downloading the latest episode of 'Grey's Anatomy,' the worst part is that those people are all using bandwidth to get the same thing. The Scratch drive, though questionable legally, curtails this to a certain degree."
Other students, like Ashley Smith '06, think accommodating illegal downloading is the wrong course of action. "The real issue is that it's not the school's responsibility to provide enough bandwidth so Amherst students can download as many movies and TV shows as they please, but they have taken on the responsibility to ensure that students have sufficient bandwidth to accomplish tasks necessary for their schoolwork," she said. "When the former infringes on the latter, unfortunately, something has to be done that not everyone is going to like."
IT is currently concocting several plans to fix the present bandwidth problem. First, the College is going to increase the capacity of its Internet link to 30 Mbps within the next few weeks, which will partly alleviate the situation. However, Schilling is quick to point out that bandwidth increases are not the answer. "This type of problem has also occurred many times in the past at colleges and universities around the country," he said. "For this reason we know that simply increasing the bandwidth without working with students to change how they use it will not solve the problem."
The first method of "working with students" was Schilling's call for students to "self-police" their Internet behavior to lighten the load on the College's Internet connection. In addition, IT will monitor the College's network and limit the bandwidth available to those consuming the most of it-a technique known as throttling. But even these techniques have drawbacks, as throttling has the potential to hinder legitimate Internet users. For now, the IT department will continue to test out different bandwidth management systems.