Incommunicado

As college students, the Internet has become an increasingly large part of our lives. We use the Web for academic research, communication with friends and professors and to access news and cultural events in our community. Unfortunately, this valuable resource has been severely limited at Rider University, making it hard for students to truly feel they have any real access to the Internet at all.

Ironically, Rider’s Office of Information Technologies (OIT) spent an enormous amount of money this summer to upgrade the computer network. However, the money was focused solely on the on-campus infrastructure, not for access to off-campus websites. The local network is so efficient that only two percent of it is being utilized. On-campus access to the Rider website and any other on-campus network site is as fast as anyone could hope for—which would be great if most of the information we needed was available from on-campus sites. But, of course, it’s not. While the local network at Rider may be incredibly efficient, the connection to the Internet is what we could politely call “inadequate.”

To put the situation into perspective, a technical explanation is necessary. On campus, the network is such that it can transfer one gigabyte (1,000 megabytes) of information to and from each building with the use of fiber-optic cables—the top of the line for communications. The transfer rate to and from the Internet is split between two 1.5 megabyte pipes. Hence, a bottleneck of information occurs that is worse than what would happen if 10,000 cars squeezed into two lanes on the Turnpike at one time.

No one person is at fault for this mess. Perhaps we can accuse OIT for its lack of foresight on the growing demand for the Internet. With file-sharing services such as Morphius, Gnutella and I-Mesh—trading not just music anymore, but videos as well—the traffic load has greatly increased on the network. We could blame OIT for using so much money to upgrade the internal network without contributing any towards an upgrade on external access to the Internet. However, the upgrades of this summer would have been necessary at some point in time, so perhaps it was better to get it over with now. We could also point fingers at the administration for not supplying OIT with enough money to upgrade every aspect of the Rider network instead of only half of it.

To help with the problem, OIT has spent money on Net Enforcer. This device divides the separate incoming and outgoing pipes to limit what type of traffic and how much of that can go through at any given time. Depending on allocation of bandwidth, this may make Internet web-surfing faster, but it does nothing to fix the bottom line. For example, instant messaging traffic may only be limited to one percent of the total pipe. When that portion of the pipe is full, the amount of messages allowed through is restricted, causing dropped connections and other errors.

The trouble is that OIT decides which applications and web sites are valid academic traffic. There is no input from students or faculty on what is allowed through at what times. In a sense, OIT has been given the God-like rights to limit how students and faculty can communicate without input from either party. This travesty is absolutely unacceptable and must stop immediately. Faculty and students, must have input on how we would like to communicate and what we should be able to download.

What we need to focus on now are solutions. The faculty should be actively discussing these issues in its academic policy committees, and the Student Government Association should also work to put pressure on OIT. Once OIT stops acting above students and faculty, with oversight by those parties, positive change can occur. Rider does, however, plan to buy more bandwidth—essentially, more access to the Internet—within “a few weeks.” With the semester nearly over, this seems like a pathetic gesture. Students will continue to have difficulty researching for finals and communicating with colleagues, friends and family all the way up until winter break, it seems.