On Oct. 12, a campus-wide email in the Weekly Announcements explained a change in IT&S policy regarding Bandwidth Usage and File Sharing Applications. An e-mail was sent at the beginning of the semester with the policy adjustment, to try cut down the burden on the network due to music and video file sharing programs. IT&S decided to change the policy because, as Teresa Sanford explained, “Last year, single users were found to have used 5-10% of the college’s entire Internet connection in any given week.” This is a violation of both the previous and current policies, which state, “applications that use a disproportionate use of bandwidth for unreasonable amounts of time, inhibiting use of the network by others, is not permitted.” Several times last year, the network had difficulties supporting excessive traffic, despite the recent expansion.

Guilford’s Network Acceptable Use Policy states that the college “does not authorize anyone other than IT&S to run any servers for serving data outside of the Guilford College network without obtaining advance permission from IT&S.” If users run programs like Napster, AudioGalaxy, Morpheus, or other sharing programs, however, they may be sharing out files, which is often a default.

Even with a small number of Guilford’s computers used as servers to the outside Internet, instead of just sharing within our network, it greatly reduces the speed of the network, causing pains for everyone and everything involving the network.

So, starting on Sept. 17, IT&S began to watch the amount of total amount of bandwidth occupied (i.e. the percentage of the data transfer rate used) and which network users took up the most. The bandwidth, not the content, was monitored. IT&S then stated that if someone occupied more than 2% of the college’s total bandwidth over two days, they would get a voice-mail warning and have one business day to talk to IT&S and two days to reduce their over-usage. This policy was only a trial, to see if it successfully reduced the problem.

However, after a 24-day period of monitoring bandwidth, IT&S “recorded 128 users with over 206 violations [of the previous policy], 63 of those users repeated the same violation, even after receiving a warning.”

Obviously, the policy was not a success.

Teresa Sanford rationalized the new policy revisions, explaining that “50% of all incoming traffic to Guilford during the week from Sept. 27 to Oct. 4 consisted of downloads from file sharing sites.”

In addition, the same sharing sites were responsible for 71% of outbound traffic. Guilford’s principal applications of the Internet, for Lotus Notes and Web access, only used 21% of outbound and 38% of inbound traffic combined. This means that sharing type of programs occupied over half of the traffic during the trial period.

Since warnings and announcements were not effective, IT&S decided to change the policy with stiffer limits and consequences to “preserve reasonable Internet access for academic and administrative use of the Internet by students, staff and faculty.”

IT&S notes that network users are responsible “to know what programs are running on [your] computer, to understand what those programs might be doing, particularly with respect to transmitting files to and from other computers or the Internet, and to run up-to-date anti-virus software. The IT&S Help Desk can provide general assistance on these issues, but the Help Desk cannot recommend or support file-sharing software.” In other words, ignorance is not an excuse.