Students that exceed one gigabyte of internet usage weekly will no longer have their service suspended, Paul Murphy, Dean of Students, announced in an email to the community last Thursday. Cluster deans will still receive a weekly report of the ten students with the highest bandwidth use. If there is concern over a student’s usage, cluster deans will still have the authority to restrict a student’s internet access, Murphy said. “I don’t think [students] will notice any difference,” Murphy said. “What’s going to happen is that we’re not going to care about individual students’ volume. We’re trying to move away from discipline as a vehicle… We wanted to leave the door open to monitor in case it was clear someone’s internet use was getting in the way of their school work,” Murphy added. In Fall 2006, the school retired official disciplinary responses to students who exceeded the limit, but their internet service was still suspended. In one week last October, more than one in four boarders exceeded the bandwidth limit — though many of them questioned the school’s results. “Colleges and other schools have adopted [a similar policy], so I have to believe it’s going to be a good outcome,” he continued. However, Murphy cautioned students to continue following the Acceptable Use Policy (AUP), which outlines the Academy’s policy on downloading and sharing copyrighted media on its network and over the internet. Disciplinary action will be taken if these guidelines are broken, Murphy confirmed. According to the email, although the Academy network can support up to 120 megabytes per second, only 60 have been allotted to the residential network. This limit has been established to protect downloading speeds in other academic and administrative locations on campus, said Roman. In addition, a one-megabyte per second cap will esxist for student’s downloading speed. Carl Jackson ’09, a Techmaster and Director of The Phillipian Online, said, “I think [the new policy] is a lot better than last year’s. Now you can download more than 1GB one week, less the next, and as long as your downloading remains reasonable, you won’t get in trouble.” However, Christian Anderson ’09, a Techmaster cited a potential problem with the downloading speed caps. He said, “Each student is capped at one megabyte per second, which is faster than the connection on many of the websites they visit. Nonetheless, only 60 students on registered dorm computers [have to] saturate those connections before all begin to see a reduction in speed.” He continued, “The foreseeable problem – and the Technology department has already asked for feedback on this – is that students will begin to suffer from reduced speeds, particularly during high traffic periods.” “Nonetheless,” he added, “no student now needs to fear effectively invisible bandwidth limits.” Hana Kim ’11 described her frustrations with the one-gigabyte limit last year. “I went over three times my Junior year, but I never knew why,” she said. “There were people across the hall downloading videos all the time who never went over.” As Murphy and Roman described in their email, the one-gigabyte bandwidth limit was originally established in 2003 as a method of regulating student internet use. At the time, high bandwidth use was frequently a sign of illegal downloading. Additionally, internet users on campus were encountering slow connection speeds. Since then, Phillips Academy’s internet use has changed drastically, Murphy and Roman stated in the email. More legal downloading resources, coupled with a dramatically increased capacity for internet bandwidth, have resolved many of the issues that once plagued the campus network. In response, the Technology Office began testing various alternatives to the former policy, Roman said. During a pilot in the Summer Session of 2007, Phillips Academy provided bandwidth monitoring systems to students. However, this method proved unsuccessful due to the bandwidth requirements of these programs, according to Roman. Roman and Murphy tested the current pilot in the Summer Session of 2008. After positive results, the pilot was implemented for the fall term. However, “[The Technology Office] agrees that the environment during the summer is different and the results this fall may not be the same. That is why this is considered a pilot,” she said. In addition to the new bandwidth policy, the Technology Office has overseen other changes across campus. Wireless access has been added to eighteen buildings on campus. A new computer lab is installed in Morse Hall and forty-two laptops are now available to scholarship students. Roman said, “Each year, the Trustees allocate a certain amount of funding for new technology initiatives. The Executive Committee on Technology, with input from the Academic Committee on Technology and the Administrative Committee on Technology, work with me each year to prioritize requests and decide how that money should be used.” Currently, the Technology Office is preparing for a reevaluation of Andover’s technology programs. From September 16 to 18, Kaludis Counseling, a higher education consulting firm, will come to campus to assess the current technology needs and construct new plans for the next four years. “I really hope that students participate since we really want to make sure that the student perspective is included in the plan,” Roman said.
