Slow Internet connection at start of year not a new problem

Lauren Sutherland Assistant News Editor

Over the last few weeks, the College’s Internet connection has been reportedly slow or non-existent. Vassar campus has been rife with complaints, speculations and rumors regarding the causes of the Internet situation.

Leah Wilks ’09 said that her Internet connection in her room in Main often prevents her from checking email and dance rehearsal schedules.

“Mainly, [the computer] will say that I have a wireless connection and then it won’t work, or the Ethernet connection won’t show up on my computer,” said Wilks. “If I log off and get back on later it will sometimes work, or else I have to go in search of someone else’s computer.”

Other students noticed problems with specific programs, such as AOL Instant Messenger.
“Sometimes I can't get on to AIM, and I think others have that problem also,” said Claire Grandison ’08, a Lathrop resident. “It's probably just too many people trying to use the Internet at once.”

Some students tried to get to the bottom of the situation. “At first I though that the high volume of Internet connections on campus was causing the problems,” said Michael Velarde ’09. “But I was inclined to rethink my hypothesis when I tried logging on at 5:30 a.m. and experienced the same difficulties.”

Director of Computing and Information Services Bret Ingerman cites the sudden influx of Internet activity that accompanies the start of the school year as the primary cause of poor Internet connections.

“When students come back at the beginning of the year with new kinds of Internet connections, its normal for the Internet to slow down while we try to ‘tweak’ the system to accommodate new developments,” said Ingerman. “We had to attend to a small misconfiguration of a piece of the network hardware, which we managed to fix after a week or two”.

Several returning students acknowledged that this was a recurring problem, and one that they had experienced in previous years at the start of the semester.
Ingerman acknowledged the partial truth behind the rumors that download programs have been interfering with the Internet connections.

He said, “I can’t say that just downloads in particular have caused the problems, but they certainly impede the system.”
Ingerman said that CIS does not block any file-sharing programs like Kazaa or Limewire.
When greater numbers of computer programs compete for limited bandwidth, the quality of the connection is often compromised, resulting in more time for users to load webpages and navigate the Internet.

Ingerman drew a sewer pipe analogy to explain the situation. “The ‘pipe’ that is connected to the Internet is only so big,” he said. “As with plumbing, a single faucet will get more water pressure, but many faucets drawing from the same source will invariably receive less pressure.”

Ingerman said that CIS does not block peer-to-peer software programs such as Kazaa and LimeWire. “All we do is limit the bandwidth allocated to the support of peer to peer software and other insidious programs that flood the ‘pipe,’” he said. “It’s just an example of the balancing act we have been performing over the last few weeks.”