I pay several thousand dollars per year for the privilege of living in this fine residence. When I handed over the check to you, I was under the assumption I would be getting high speed internet. I was told the equipment here had been upgraded and the internet would be fast and reliable!
As I type this, I have no idea if the thread will actually ever appear on the SDMB because pages have a tendency to tell me they’re unable to load. F5 has become my favorite key, as it’s necessary to refresh just about every page a couple of times just to get it to display anything. Even pages with very few graphics (like Google) and pages that are already cached take ages to load.
Now, this dodgy performance is only observed from about 7:00PM to 1:00AM. I gather this is because of increased traffic during these hours, but when my friend complained to TPTB, she was told this shouldn’t be an issue because of the aforementioned new equipment. The tech guys showed up at her room twice to “fix” her internet, with no improvement whatsoever.
Now, I know there are other things on campus that must be dealt with, and the reliability of the internet service at certain times during the day probably doesn’t top out the list. I can use the internet during the afternoon and very late (or early) at night with no problems at all. But goddammit, it’s frustrating as hell when I just want to watch a video, surf the Dope or check some blogs during my precious evening time only to be met with ridiculously long loading times or a complete failure to load at all.
Probably you are sharing a hypothetically fast connection with ~100 other people, cutting the actual bandwidth to sqat. I’ve seen that scam before and I could kill the hucksters that call that a “high speed” connection.
Power cycle your “modem” every few days. That means unplugging the power source, waiting a minute, and re-starting everything from the wall in. If you’re on a T3 or T1, I have no idea how to speed up your connection, but anyone can tell you how to optimize your system’s performance.
Most likely, you’re sharing bandwidth, and you will never attain the max d/l speed you were promised. It would be a real shame if some of the other students in your complex suddenly had their access to the 'net disabled.
If your university allows downloading of files (music and movies) and/or allows online gaming that is probably most of the problem. They should be able to monitor usage and see who the worst offenders are and they can deal with that (or should be able to).
Darn kids and your “high speed internet in the dormroom” this, and “wireless access anywhere on campus” that! I bet you even have phone service TO YOUR ROOM! Why, when I started college and moved into the dorms, we had:
no internet service in the rooms–you had to actually leave the dorm and go to one of the computer labs, and take the chance that the person before you had left the remains from “happy time” on the screen (actually a rarity, and usually only in one of the 24 hour labs).
no cable in rooms - had to go together as a floor to buy a tv (or hope someone would donate one to the cause), and had to actually agree on what to watch! Or, you could go to the student center, and hope you could see something you wanted in one of the tv lounges. Upshot-if you bought a tv as a floor, you might win it at the end-of-year lottery.
No phone service to dorm rooms - there was one (rotary dial) phone per floor, and a big message board for whoever answered the phone. If you wanted to make a toll call, you had to go down to the main lobby, and get in line to use one of the two pay phones. You could, of course, receive calls on the floor phone, and there were always one or two people on it ALL THE TIME. Talking to their parents. Cut the strings already, people!
Oh, and I started college in 1995!
(of course, all of this only lasted the first quarter of freshman year, as they finished the residence hall upgrades that gave every room on campus phone, internet, and cable service during the holiday break. But still, get off my lawn!)
When I went to a very techologically-progressive university, we:
[ol]
[li]Didn’t have ‘personal’ computers. Almost everyone used the computer lab in the Undergrad.[/li][li]Didn’t have “Microsoft” programs. We used ZenWord…and liked it! (OK, not so much)[/li][li]We didn’t have this newfangled “internet”. We had all heard of something called “Mosaic”, but I thought it came from the Fine Arts department.[/li][/ol]
When I started college, they were installing the computer lab! There was no such thing as a PC - you actually wrote your papers by hand and/or typed them on a typewriter!
I must have started college about the same time you did, SnakesCatLady (1970). The “computer lab” at my college consisted of a room with several teletype machines where we practiced writing computer programs with punchcards and paper tapes, using a language called IITran.
There was no “cable TV” in the dorms; the town did have a cable TV service which allowed you to get more than the two networks broadcast in town, but the dorms weren’t wired for it. You could pay to have the phone line in your room activated, which some students did to avoid having to use the pay phones in the stairwell.
We used to have this problem. Every student and his roommate was using bitTorrent and Kazaa and whatever else all night and crippling the pipe. We now have an appliance that cuts off users that are “engaging in traffic patterns detrimental to the health and function of the network*” and the problem has been reduced tremendously.
we don’t block peer-to-peer. Technically, we don’t know who’s using peer-to-peer. Don’t subpoena us to find out. But, it turns out that most peer to peer software engages in these bad traffic patterns (multiple connections and lots of traffic)
Huh! My university doesn’t supply Internet to its residences. We can order it ourselves (at extra cost), and pretty much everybody does. I’ve been trying to get it for my residence for the past month, and having a helluva time doing so. They keep getting the address wrong, although it seems to me that if they have as many subscribers as they do in that building, they should know where it is by now.
Oh well. I’m getting tired of lugging my laptop to the library. Maybe tomorrow (which is what I’ve been saying for the past month)…
Whoa, flashbacks! In my hall of residence the phones on each floor were pushbutton, but there was always a greek person using them, all the time on every floor. The computer room in the basement had three or four PCs with orange-on-black monitors that all shared some pitiful connection to the main Uni network, and a green-on-black dumb terminal (with a dipswitch for caps lock) that I think hooked into one of the servers using kermit on a 300 baud connection. Fortunately this was back in the early nineties so the internet was pretty much a text-only affair unless you ventured into the realms of uudecode.
I concur with those who say it’s probably people using P2P services and playing online games. Curse them! I keep my laptop pristine and free of spyware infested programs (Limewire, I’m lookin’ at you). Ugh, it just sucks because I know there’s not a damn thing I can do about the slow performance except bitch about it, which really doesn’t help, I’ve discovered. Of course, the internet has been working well the past couple of nights, giving me false hope that the problem will go away forever, but I know it’s going to sneak back up on me again when I least expect it. Although I do feel better hearing from all of you who didn’t have the luxury of internet access, cable TV and a phone line in their dorm room!
Anyone who has never dropped a stack of punch cards down the stairs is just a baby.