Can colleges respond to bandwidth demand without drawing student ire?

Six in 10 colleges don't monitor individual bandwidth consumption.

Grappling with students’ insatiable appetite for bandwidth, college technology officials on one in five campuses have instituted strict limitations on how many laptops, smart phones, and tablets a student can connect to the school network.

That finding, along with a host of other approaches to maintaining secure, powerful web connections across campus, were published by the Association for Information Communications Technology Professionals in Higher Education (ACUTA), which on March 22 released its first “State of the ResNet Report.”

ResNet is short for residential network, or the internet connection provided to campus dormitories and, usually, a range of school buildings.…Read More

March Madness online streaming taxes campus networks

UD Mercy saw a 30-percent increase in bandwidth usage this week.

If Marquette University students weren’t on spring break this week, the school’s IT officials would have faced an internet bandwidth nightmare.

The Marquette Golden Eagles were building a lead in the second half of their first round NCAA Tournament game March 15 against the underdog Brigham Young University (BYU) Cougars when Mary Simmons, Marquette’s director of security and networks, saw that the campus’s bandwidth was “pretty much pegged,” or maxed out, even on the slowest week of the spring semester.

Whoever was left on campus, Simmons said, was streaming the game online, and IT staffers could track the sky-high use of network bandwidth.…Read More