In a recent letter to residence hall occupants, University Housing officials said the UW ResNet is congested and students will need to cut down on their use or face additional fees. Officials said over the past year they \have discovered a rapid growth in computer network traffic.""
University Housing officials said ""student computers offering content to others"" accounts for most of ResNet's congestion.
""We try to encourage the students to not take up [a lot of] space,"" said Larry Davis, a senior student service coordinator, whose office was responsible for the letter.
University Housing provided a Web site, http://www.doit.wisc.edu/netaccess/, which has instructions on how one can stop contributing to excessive traffic. The letter said people who leave their computers online all day create traffic, which is due to others downloading music from their file machines.
Brian Rust, a senior administrator program specialist with the Division of Information Technology, said if use continues to increase, the network will face an expansion, which will be paid for by students.
""Demand is skyrocketing. We need to take action to increase the size of the network,"" Rust said.
He said students' increased demand is not fully supported by the fees they pay to use the network.
UW-Madison's trend is part of a national one, which is ""alarming a lot of universities,"" Rust said.
""It really had not reached a point where we had to take some action until this year,"" he said. ""The fact remains that network growth is growing. We're just trying to slow the growth.""
Paul Evans, director of University Housing, said there is a limited amount of bandwidth, which restricts the amount of traffic that can occur. He said the residence hall Internet has suffered a vast amount of traffic for more than a year, and use has recently peaked.
""There is too much congestion which is creating problems [with ResNet]. It's been an issue for a while,"" Evans said. ""The use is so high right now. At some point you won't be able to get in.""
Evans cites Napster and ""Napster-like things"" as some causes for computer traffic on ResNet. He said the sharing of files by many people places more stress on the bandwidth.
""More things are available on the Internet ... Everybody is using it more--everybody is sharing more,"" Evans said.
UW-Madison does not prohibit the use of Napster, a music-sharing software which enables users to download MP3s.
""What we're afraid of is it will become limited ... We want people to use only what they need to use,"" Evans said. ""We're trying to avoid the point where the capacity is used up.\
