“At the end of the day, we want them to have good capacity for recreation,” Ortstadt said. “They live here, too. We want to make sure they are doing what they want to do.”
So it is that most schools are hesitant to place individual caps on student usage.
Instead, they focus on controlling traffic during peak hours, while making sure that academic needs are still met. St. Louis University, for example, breaks its internet space into three distinct pipelines, making sure students, researchers and clinicians do not interfere with one another.
Schools also use network management tools that prevent heavy users from dominating a network. At peak traffic times, for example, a larger movie download might be slowed to save space for students doing less-intensive research.
“All we try to do is make things fair. We try hard not to limit people,” said Daniel Chace, director of network and systems infrastructure at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.
At the same time schools are managing traffic, they also have to take precautions when integrating all these new devices onto their networks. They can’t just open things up and let everyone in.
Systems have security devices and software designed to give every new device a once-over, looking for viruses and other security threats, said Greg Jackson, vice president for policy and analysis at Educause, a nonprofit that promotes the use of technology in higher education.
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