Colleges Purposely Slow Computer Networks

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the interesting-approach dept

It seems like something of a backwards strategy, but in order to combat overloaded networks due to file sharing, some universities and colleges are purposely slowing down their networks during the day to discourage students from using them to download large files. At night however, they’re free to continue their wild and crazy downloading ways. Doesn’t this seem somewhat counterintuitive? In order to avoid the network slowing down, they’re slowing down the network. However, they are keeping the data pipes wide open when it comes to non-dorm university buildings, which actually does make some sense. It’s sort of a poor man’s way to do priority based data transfers. People have talked about different schemes to let higher priority data through first, but those have all been relatively complicated. This accomplishes the same basic thing in a much simpler way.