Gotta Love the Bandwidth Cap


One week left until I peace for spring break and we have a little condition here – the regression to 1997 internet speeds. Thanks to our wonderful network staff and some bandwidth caps (oops, looks like I went over), I get to spend the next 5 days on a 56k connection (I really don’t though if you know what I mean). It was interesting to test portfolioso.com load times on a dial-up connection. Let me tell you, I’m pretty damn impressed how snappy this site loaded on dial-up. As far as the rest of the internet… No good. Simple images, web 2.0 pages and especially Gmail take about two minutes to load.

On average, when the network is busy, I’d say we get about 500KBPS to 1MBPS. That’s pretty weak. When it’s empty, individual users can see up to 30MBPS. Of course, with QOS, traffic manipulation and deep packet inspection thanks to this piece of shit, web traffic is still pretty laggy. So that 30MBPS is pretty crippled when your webpages still load slowly.

I have a suggestion for you brainiacs who work in our intertube department. If you knew anything about networking at all, you’d automatically restrict bandwidth at the time of excessive usage, not after the fact. (For example, maybe 200MB+ within certain period of time, or speeds >10MBPS for an extended period. Capping there would literally cut the download off and save bandwidth, not watste it and then cap it later on when it doesn’t matter anymore). This is why our network sucks – when people use too much, they are not capped at the time of excess consumption. Capping me now is pointless. I was even considerate enough to do my [perfectly legal and school related, educational] video download at 4AM on the weekend while everyone was blackout drunk and not using the internet for any academic purposes. Limiting me now is kind of a joke. Although I do thank you guys for not shutting it off completely. That would be an hassle.

Screenshot of a Speakeasy test and NetMeter: