The University community’s web dependence became clear last Tuesday, when the Internet shut down for several hours due to a hacker, leaving many students and faculty waiting anxiously for unfettered access to return. Fortunately, it did. This brief technical glitch, however, underlines a long-term Internet issue that has been pestering the community over the last several months: a very slow streaming of online videos. This problem has especially affected those who use on-campus wireless Internet connections.

“I have been trying to watch streaming videos over the wireless connection, but they’ve been extremely slow,” said Al Fertig ’10. “I thought it was just because of the fact that the wireless connection has less bandwidth.”

While Fertig’s hypothesis is often the case, said Ganesan Ravishanker, associate vice president for Information Technology Services (ITS), something else has been going on over the last several months. The more recent problems, he said, have had to do with the system that ITS uses to monitor the bandwidth, a process that he compares to a pipe carrying water. Over the course of the day, ITS allocates the bandwidth proportionally in order to give everyone on campus the fastest Internet service possible. After five o’clock on weekdays, for example, the bandwidth usage is adjusted so that student computers can take advantage of the unused bandwidth that the faculty and staff have left behind after normal work hours.

“We basically have a couple of services that help us manage the traffic,” he said. “We need to make sure that it stays within 70 megabits per second. We shape the bandwidth depending on the need.”

The University’s financial considerations keep the bandwidth at its current level. The current problems, Ravishanker said, began in the first few weeks of the semester.

“In late January, we started fielding calls from students saying that YouTube videos were not truly streaming,” he said. “They had to wait until it completely downloaded to watch it. So we started looking at what could be causing it.”

After ITS staff investigated the matter, they found that their built-in system for monitoring the bandwidth, which is self-regulated, had automatically lowered the priority of streaming video without anyone’s knowledge. James Taft, assistant director of Technology Support Services, explained that the system reacted to the high levels of bandwidth that streaming video requires.

“One of the updates caused it to misidentify streaming video and give it less bandwidth,” Taft said. “With a webpage, where it takes only 5 to 10 seconds to load, you can read it forever and it only consumes bandwidth for those 5 to 10 seconds and then that bandwidth is free for others to use. With YouTube, until it is finished streaming—which can take a while—it is actively using bandwidth.”

The misidentification was addressed soon after. For those with on-campus wireless connections, however, problems with streaming video persisted until Friday, when The Argus conducted an inquiry with Ravishanker. After another investigation, ITS employees discovered that the bandwidth monitor had again lowered the priority of streaming video—this time for wireless networks, specifically.

“We went and checked and something similar had happened with wireless,” Ravishanker said.

As for now, ITS employees say they have fixed the problem and encourage students to check out ravisblog.wesleyan.edu for more detailed information about the error. Next year, they say, as bandwidth becomes less expensive, it will again be increased—a change that may prevent similar problems in the future.

“As bandwidth gets cheaper every year, we purchase more every year and we expect to purchase more for next year,” Ravishanker said. “There is always more and more traffic, but we are constrained by the amount budgeted for network.”