Internet speed may increase
By Laura Pelner
Campus
Editor
After doing research this weekend, employees of
Purdue's computing center made a change to the University's Internet
connections this morning that may improve online connection speeds.
"We've used the weekend to gather more data and
we've done experiments," said Scott Ksander, the associate director
of the computing center.
Ksander said that over the weekend PUCC's employees
tried to understand the amount of traffic and the different applications
influencing Purdue's Internet connections. "As a result, we feel we
have a good profile (of what's going on)."
This morning the computing center put a new configuration
into its system. "We think this is the best balance for the different
applications," said Ksander. "It has to do with balancing the usage
amongst applications so no single application or web access can take
a disproportionate part of the load.
"What's happening now is that (the connection)
is a shared resource and the balance is not right among the people and
the applications that have to share it. We're trying to see if we can
affect that balance better," said Ksander.
In addition, Ksander said that the amount of bandwidth,
which is the total space that information can transfer through on one
Internet line, has been extremely high this semester.
There are certain applications that students use
frequently that take up a lot of bandwidth, for example Napster. Ksander
said though, that Purdue has no plans to block Napster from its server.
"We haven't (planned to block it) from the beginning
and I don't foresee it now," said Ksander. "If eight months ago we talked
about (blocking Napster) it would be different (students would be against
it), but now students are saying 'why don't we block Napster?'"
Ksander said that the computing center is trying
to balance Napster use with other applications. "We might try to do
some things to see that Napster doesn't have a disproportionate part
of the bandwidth. That's one of the things we are trying to balance,
but balance does not mean block it."
The computing center has been monitoring the slow
Internet speeds and investigating their cause since the beginning of
the semester. On Friday afternoon Ksander said that the center looked
at information from students and made some improvements. "The reports
from students that we use as barometers, plus our data, shows we made
some improvement (Thursday) night," said Ksander. "Though it was not
where we wanted to be."
Ksander added that he is "cautiously optimistic"
that the situation will continue to improve.
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