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macintologist · Apr 9, 2006, 10:23 PM

My college's internet connection sucks. First of all downloads are capped at approx. 65k/sec. Also, about once every month or so the network in all the residences halls dies. The DCHP server crashes somehow (so we dont get an IP address at all) and it doesnt go back up online until more than 24 hours later.

Additionally, when the internet is working, it craps out quite often. For example, let's say I'm browsing through MacNN forum pages (typically at 11pm or so), after about 10 minutes of browsing, it will take FOREVER to load a link, any link, like google, another MacNN page, ANYTHING (except the college's own website). It does this for a while then the internet works right again for only 10 minutes and then it craps out AGAIN!

How good/bad is your college's network and internet speeds. Fast? Slow? Reliable? Unreliable?

mindwaves · Apr 9, 2006, 10:25 PM

It dies sometimes on weekends. All p2p is blocked. However, when it does work, it is fast and reliable. Frequent e-mail downs however.

macintologist · Apr 9, 2006, 10:29 PM

Originally Posted by mindwaves

All p2p is blocked.

I guess I'm lucky in that regard. No ports are blocked however P2p Is VERY slow. Bitorrent takes weeks to download a 700MB file. I just leave the computer on all day. I think they do packet shapping. But once in a while Cabos will scream. It just depends.

goMac · Apr 9, 2006, 10:34 PM

University of Washington has the fastest connection that I know of. They run on of the Internet nexus's for Washington state, meaning they have no ISP. They are literally directly on the internet, so they basically have no bandwidth caps. I have friends there who get multi-megabyte download rates. Their downloads are only really limited by the speed of their computers.

jamil5454 · Apr 9, 2006, 10:47 PM

I'm not part of the uni network, but we DO have campus-wide wireless G

And it is very reliable (Univ of Texas)

King Bob On The Cob · Apr 9, 2006, 10:48 PM

University of Illinois's network is unsurpassed... I love getting 1 MB/second from where can get it.

jamil5454 · Apr 9, 2006, 11:42 PM

Originally Posted by King Bob On The Cob

University of Illinois's network is unsurpassed... I love getting 1 MB/second from where can get it.

Huh? Was a word left out of that sentence or is it just me?

Ghoser777 · Apr 9, 2006, 11:47 PM

I remember U of Illinois being good when I was there... went over the quota a couple times though. Those were the days.

volcano · Apr 10, 2006, 12:12 AM

Originally Posted by jamil5454

I'm not part of the uni network, but we DO have campus-wide wireless G

And it is very reliable (Univ of Texas)

I've never had any connection problems on campus - it's always fast, speedy, and reliable.

MaxPower2k3 · Apr 10, 2006, 01:18 AM

network here (school of visual arts) is quite fast... ranges between 10 and 35mbits down and around 10 up. the only problem is they block tons of ports. AIM file transfers don't work, most P2P doesn't, although bittorrent works to a certain extent (most stuff downloads eventually, but really slowly. i assume because most of the ports it uses are blocked). It works most of the time, although occasionally (especially earlier in the year) it would go out inexplicably for a couple of hours.

angelmb · Apr 10, 2006, 02:25 AM

Originally Posted by goMac

Their downloads are only really limited by the speed of their computers.

Going to happen in my country… never!!

goMac · Apr 10, 2006, 02:30 AM

Originally Posted by angelmb

Going to happen in my country… never!!

They're so fast actually that a school district I worked at used them (University of Washington) as our ISP. Qwest wired us a connection to their campus which was about 30 miles away. I believe Washington State is wiring all the public school districts in the sound area to the University of Washington. I believe we had a 20 mbit connection to UW.

ghporter · Apr 10, 2006, 08:19 AM

UTSA has a very good network, with wireless (finally) in all the academic buildings on both campuses. I'm on it right now. Some of the wireless access points are a little slow-or maybe just not well positioned for where I get to sit to use them-but it's not a problem.

Here in Texas, there's a bill in work to ban P2P on ALL state-owned networks. Considering how many Windows users have a negative clue factor for security, and how much bandwidth they can suck up with just BitTorrent, the state figures it's better to just ban them all and retain the bandwidth for intended uses. And I've seen plenty of classmates doing enough stupid stuff with their computers while on campus to say that, if there are undergrads involved, more security is better! (And I'd argue that "undergraduate" is as much a mental state as an educational state.)

ambush · Apr 10, 2006, 08:27 AM

Capped @ 30k/s (wifi) and 1mb/s (ether), all p2p, chat blocked.
Novell BorderManager blocks lots of nice sites (YouTUbe, etc)

but then I can hook up to a private T1 via Wifi. I then get 1mb down 100k up for ALL p2p, everything I want.

LOVE it.

tooki · Apr 10, 2006, 09:04 AM

My school has a 622Mbps connection to the Internet, plus a 1Gbps connection to Internet2. Downloads are blazing fast from servers that can push fast (most can't).

Apparently, there are caps and port blocking in the residence halls, but the campus in general has no such restrictions.

tookis

Judge_Fire · 10:35 AM

We're sitting on 10 Gbp/s courtesy of the Finnish University Network. It's plenty fast.

The wireless implementation in the house could be better - Apple File Protocol, Bonjour and subnets in general require some voodoo from users. But practices like daily WLAN passwords for visitors, or the ability to get a real (not NAT) IP address for your projects is nice.

Excessive traffic is monitored, to spot P2P etc. abuse. It can get a bit too tight - I once got Funet to blacklist our whole campus for 30 min by just launching Acquisition and running one search. They suspected some kind of aggressive port scanning. Oops.

J

davesimondotcom · Apr 10, 2006, 10:34 AM

Pssht... when I was in college, there was no network. And if you wanted to get on the 'net, you used a 2400 baud modem on a Mac Classic.

Krypton · Apr 10, 2006, 11:02 AM

Loughborough University have a very reliable (and fast) connection; I can easily get download speeds of 1Mb per second or more. They do block P2P, but that's to be expected

zmcgill · Apr 10, 2006, 11:15 AM

P2P is blocked in the res halls, but not over the general wireless. They automatically block any computer running an untracked torrent, and I got caught d/ling a couple torrents a while back, I was threatened with legal and school consequences. Besides that, downloads are extremely fast. I Activity monitor reported incoming speeds of 16MB/sec when downloading large updates from apple through Software Update.

©öñFü$íóÑ · Apr 11, 2006, 03:02 AM

Originally Posted by goMac

University of Washington has the fastest connection that I know of. They run on of the Internet nexus's for Washington state, meaning they have no ISP. They are literally directly on the internet, so they basically have no bandwidth caps. I have friends there who get multi-megabyte download rates. Their downloads are only really limited by the speed of their computers.

Bah... ISP's.... middlemen....

I really don't care how fast my downloads are. I mean, aside from loading webpages and the occasional song from iTunes, I don't do much of it. Just so long as my ping on gaming servers is around or below 100. (i've been known to score 200+ kills on a certain first-person-shooter, even with a ping of 600+) (dial-up connection from the west coast to a new york server)

(Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force 1)

Dr.Michael · Apr 11, 2006, 03:39 AM

University and Max-Planck (where I am now) have 64 MBit lines. 100 MBytes in less than 30 seconds real time speed sometimes.

angelmb · Apr 11, 2006, 04:58 AM

Originally Posted by Judge_Fire

We're sitting on 10 Gbp/s courtesy of the Finnish University Network. It's plenty fast.

Awesome, a flying finnish out there…

SSharon · Apr 11, 2006, 01:58 PM

University of Maryland:
E-mail 100mb of storage, servers restart daily at 4:15am (very annoying). Every other month or so mail would get delayed by 12 hours or more. Lots of spam gets through and lots more is coming from other on campus computers.

Wireless in most buildings and many outdoor locations. WAP not allowed in residence halls (ignored by all students).

Ethernet: static IP addresses and 1mb/s up/down. Faster in some of the newer buildings.

packetshaper in use to throttle BT traffic. no ports blocked.

No official bandwidth cap but if you dl more than X megabytes in 24 hours they block you for a day or two. I d/l 70+GB one week with no problem.

DeathToWindows · Apr 11, 2006, 02:46 PM

BU is very interesting; I can get sustained dl speeds over ether around 700kb/s... email is capped at 150Mb... but personal websites are capped at 4Mb... extremely crappy VPN protocols for wireless (cisco client software; buggy as hell).

Salty · Apr 11, 2006, 03:53 PM

Ha I think i gotcha'll beat.

The prov network. T1 line for the whole school, that includes staff, faculty and students. Bandwidth capped at 300 megs (though 8 bucks a gig after that so not that bad). Aswell, we have to have a certain page open so that they can log traffic (make sure you're not looking at naughty sites). No p2p, (would you want to!?) pop3 download, no SMTP with gmail for some reason, no iTunes music store, etc.
And best part, we pay 80 bucks per semester for it. AND! You're not allowed to have wireless routers in dorm because then you could steal internet access IE share between two people or a whole dorm.
The fun part is they refuse to PUT wireless access points in dorm. So we Mac users just have our AirPort Expresses running as closed networks so only we can see em and the network guys can't.

zmcgill · Apr 11, 2006, 05:29 PM

Originally Posted by Salty

So we Mac users just have our AirPort Expresses running as closed networks so only we can see em and the network guys can't.

Is that allowed under your contract?

brapper · Apr 11, 2006, 05:32 PM

All I know is that when the library gets full, the Macs lose the fight for wireless signal strength to PC laptops. I dont know why this is, though.
Sucks ass.

voodoo · Apr 11, 2006, 05:44 PM

The network at my university is very good. All p2p allowed, no caps, all connections T3 on campus, T1 at the dorms. No particular downside that I can think of. Just an open and very fast internet. Free too.

[edit: they only allocate 100MB webspace per student, that's the only downside - 500MBs would be appropriate IMO]

V

Salty · Apr 11, 2006, 06:10 PM

Originally Posted by Gossamer

Is that allowed under your contract?

Well the reason they're not allowed is that you could do bad stuff. If I'm not doing anything bad I don't see what the problem is.

alphasubzero949 · Apr 11, 2006, 06:17 PM

Cal State Fullerton. I don't miss their network at all.

If it weren't Windows viruses causing "problems" and killing the network, it was the IT department's draconian firewalling of virtually every service. Sherlock, P2P, AIM (I had to use a different port), iBlog, Backup 2, etc. were all rendered useless. As if that weren't bad enough, your connection was hijacked every 4 hours. If you were surfing, suddenly you would be redirected to an authentication page.

That's still the case on their open WiFi network on the main parts of campus. I hardly ever use that network anymore.

My cable connection is comparably quick and without much restrictions. Downtime is very minimal and usually in the middle of the wee hours.

Magicite · Apr 11, 2006, 06:39 PM

St. Olaf College

Crap. All UDP traffic blocked (no FPS, most games don't work, streaming issues, so anything with audio/video in iChat doesn't work).

An aggressive packet shaper limits bandwidth to under 1k on all ports outside of 80, 1080, 8080, and a few random critical ones.

All P2P essentially blocked. The college itself, outside of the main web server, is completely inaccessible from the outside world. Pings in our general area go unheard, and further, we can't even ping anyone.

Repeated attempts to at least unblock UDP traffic have fallen upon deaf ears here.

. . . and tuition is $35k next year

Dr Reducto · Apr 11, 2006, 07:13 PM

Originally Posted by tooki

My school has a 622Mbps connection to the Internet, plus a 1Gbps connection to Internet2. Downloads are blazing fast from servers that can push fast (most can't).

Apparently, there are caps and port blocking in the residence halls, but the campus in general has no such restrictions.

tookis

I assume you go to UMBC then?

I go there, and it is nice. i2hub was great, and so is the campus DC++ hub, although it's bottlenecked by a 10BaseT cable drop to the individual rooms.

JoshuaZ · Apr 11, 2006, 07:15 PM

My college network did suck... so badly. Torrents were next to impossible, downloads were ****, browsing was a pain. A lot of people got Cable Internet in their dorm rooms to speed things up. Thank goodness I`m out of there now.

ghporter · Apr 11, 2006, 08:43 PM

I see a lot of people being disturbed by caps and enjoying evading those and other limitations. I see it in more corporate terms: the university's Internet connection must be shared by everyone on campus in every activity. If students in the dorms soak up 50% of the available bandwidth downloading illegal songs, not only does research suffer, but the RIAA can go for the university's throat. Feel free to pirate and such on your own connection, but don't complain too much when your school makes it very difficult for you to put THEM in jepoardy.

Rant over.

My experience with campus networks at UTSA has been uniformly positive. Most of the places I study in have great wireless signal strength, and I've never had a slowdown because of other users. Sometimes I find that the coverage in one of my accustomed carels is a little less than it should be, but since I do not know exactly where the access points are, I can't say that it's because of this or that. Otherwise, no complaints at all.

draggerman11 · Apr 11, 2006, 10:23 PM

University of California, at San Diego.

I do not go there, but my girlfriend does. The internet in the dorm is okay. Decently fast (as fast as my cable at home, which averages ~350 kb/s), but it drops the internet connection periodically, which is incredibly annoying.

I will be attending Whittier college in the fall, and I am hoping their internet service is decent. Does anyone have any experience? (A shot in the dark, as it is a rather tiny school, but I'll try none the less.)

SSharon · Apr 11, 2006, 10:30 PM

Originally Posted by DeathToWindows

BU is very interesting; I can get sustained dl speeds over ether around 700kb/s... email is capped at 150Mb... but personal websites are capped at 4Mb... extremely crappy VPN protocols for wireless (cisco client software; buggy as hell).

Yikes, I thought I covered everything but I forgot about VPN. I use the same crappy cisco client software and it drives me nuts.

ghporter: I am on my schools p2p task force group and although the school is not thrilled that illelgal file transfers take place they do nothing to stop them. The only exception is if the riaa/mpaa/whoever complains to the school. then they send out cease and desist letters (~100 per semester in case you are curious).
University of Maryland at college park likely shares the same connection to the internet that tooki has, but I know that they won't give some dorms higher speeds than others so they are waiting for all of them to be upgraded.

ObiWan Flanders · Apr 11, 2006, 11:11 PM

U of Idaho has a 2.4 Gbps connection with campus wide wifi. Extremely reliable, I don't think I've ever not been able to connect. Its pretty pipe here actually.

krillbee · Apr 11, 2006, 11:46 PM

Originally Posted by macintologist

My college's internet connection sucks. First of all downloads are capped at approx. 65k/sec. Also, about once every month or so the network in all the residences halls dies. The DCHP server crashes somehow (so we dont get an IP address at all) and it doesnt go back up online until more than 24 hours later.

Additionally, when the internet is working, it craps out quite often. For example, let's say I'm browsing through MacNN forum pages (typically at 11pm or so), after about 10 minutes of browsing, it will take FOREVER to load a link, any link, like google, another MacNN page, ANYTHING (except the college's own website). It does this for a while then the internet works right again for only 10 minutes and then it craps out AGAIN!

How good/bad is your college's network and internet speeds. Fast? Slow? Reliable? Unreliable?

we get about 60k/sec, sometimes worse when it gets busy.
The most annoying thing though is this program called websense that makes it so half the sites i want to visit on the internet are blocked. I have to spend sometimes 20 minutes searching for a working proxy server to get around the thing. they even block the sites which list the proxy servers.