Seniors living in woodframe houses have always complained about not being connected to the campus network, but this year has brought a whole new problem. A number of houses have seen an unusual number of internet outages, sometimes happening as often as once a day.
The trouble started over the summer, when the Information Technology Services (ITS) switched to Comcast as an internet provider.
“It’s still a new system, so we’ve been working the kinks out of it,” said Helpdesk RCC Manager Thomas McAteer ’06. “It appears that to a large extent the problem is Comcast serving up a signal that is intermittent. The modem is looking for a connection that is simply not being delivered by Comcast.”
Internet outages have occurred in some houses on a weekly or daily basis, often interrupting activities that students on the campus network take for granted.
“[Internet outages have] definitely disrupted research, and I’ve had to go to the computer lab,” said Home Avenue resident Tom Chase ’06. “My roommates use my printer, and if they e-mail things to themselves and can’t get it, they have to go to the computer lab.”
According to McAteer, another major problem stems from student use of peer-to-peer software like LimeWire and Bit Torrent, which use a huge amount of the upload capacity of the modems.
“A lot of peer-to-peer software makes high usage of uploading bandwidth, and these modems and the routers are not designed to be sending out that much information,” McAteer said.
Justin Schmidt ’06 has had problems with internet outage in his woodframe house on Fountain Street, and admits that using LimeWire is probably causing the outage. Still, he said he wishes there was clearer information about what to do when the internet goes down.
“There should be at least an explanation of, if your internet is down, what do you do?” Schmidt said.
The Comcast system is an improvement over the DSL modems that served the houses last year, McAteer said, because the DSL lines were even worse at handling student internet use.
Senior woodframe houses aren’t connected to the campus network because of the high cost of laying the connection cables. Instead, each house has a modem in the basement that controls access for the entire house.
Because of Connecticut state fire regulations, all basements of University houses are closed to students at risk of a $500 penalty. When the internet goes down, though, the solution can be as simple as resetting the modem. Instead of waiting for an ITS employee to reset it, a number of students have taken matters into their own hands and broken into their basements to solve the problem.
“Everybody has been breaking into their basements or having someone unlock them for them,” said Sara Cohen ’06. “Unless they find a way to fix everyone’s internet definitively, they have to let us into our basements.”
McAteer said that, if students call the ITS Helpdesk at x4000 to report problems, they can come up with a solution that doesn’t involve breaking into basements.
“For those students that are really having that much problem, at this point we would probably be very wiling to install auto-reset timers,” he said.
The timers have already been installed in eight houses, and by resetting the modem on a daily basis keep the system from going down.
Comcast is also studying a number of houses with chronic internet problems, and is conducting a study on Home Avenue houses to determine the cause of the frequent outages.
“The hope is that through the next coming weeks we’ll be able to sort out with Comcast the root of the problem,” McAteer said. “It is theoretically the ideal service. They offer a tremendous amount of bandwidth. When the modems are working properly they serve student needs well.”
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