At least one student temporarily lost his internet access last week even though he didn’t go over the bandwidth limit, raising more questions about the school’s bandwidth monitoring system after more than 200 students violated the bandwidth policy two weeks ago. But the Technology Office still believes the main cause of bandwidth overages is lack of attention to the rules, although it has identified issues with students registering their computers incorrectly, according to Director of Technology Valerie Roman. Chad Hollis ’08 was not informed that he exceeded the bandwidth limit last week but quickly noticed that his internet was shut off at the same time as the 38 violators on the list sent to cluster deans. Hollis spoke to Michael Wade, the Technology Support Coordinator, and discovered that his computer was registered under Jimmy Xu’s ’08 name. Xu, whose internet access was also shut off, had exceeded the bandwidth limit. Hollis eventually regained internet access after re-registering his computer under his own name. Roman explained that both students lost internet access because the bandwidth records showed that one of the two computers must have exceeded the bandwidth limit. In an email to The Phillipian, Roman wrote, “1 GB is the limit per computer, not per person.” Roman also said that this double registration issue has existed for many years. She wrote, “If a person registers two computers his/her name is associated with those two computers. A Techmaster or anyone else who helps another student register their computer will have the usage of that computer associated with them.” Both Chad Hollis and Jimmy Xu said they had never worked on each other’s computer. Roman is unsure of how many cases similar to that of Hollis and Xu could have occurred this week. She wrote, “It used to happen more in the past since Techmasters would sometime sign in as themselves when helping a student register their computer.” Roman added that Wade “will be writing up something in more detail so that people can better understand how the network registration system works.” The only way to avoid the registration issues is to remove the option to register multiple computers, a feature that students sometimes use if they have a desktop and a laptop computer. Roman stated that the bandwidth overages do not have anything to do with the required re-registration for all on-campus computers that occurred three weeks ago. Roman said that “[the] Network and Systems Services group has reviewed the system and feels confident that the numbers are accurate and that the two events are not related.” The current bandwidth policy is that students are entitled to 1,024 megabytes of bandwidth, or 1 GB, every week. This amount is assessed in dorm landlines, not in the PACC or on wireless connections. This week 38 students were over the 1 GB limit and, for first-time offenders, had internet access in their dorm room cut off for a week. However, bandwidth violators can still access the Phillips Academy intranet, called PAnet, to check email and homework assignments. Many students still question the accuracy of the bandwidth monitoring. Tom Foley ’09 said, “I’m still 99.99% sure that I didn’t go over bandwidth.” After investigating his bandwidth usage, Foley found he exceeded the bandwidth limit by more than 700 MB. Foley, who had previously never gone over the bandwidth limit, was shocked not only to have gone over, but also to have exceeded the limit by such a large amount. But Roman cited increase use of high-bandwidth websites as the problem. In an email, she wrote, “Top sites are Facebook.com and Youtube.com. We suspect that the 38 students who are on the list this week are there for the same reason, since those seem to be the consistent culprits.”
