Academic necessity for high-bandwidth connection

[-ism]

Hello friends,

 

I go to school at San Francisco State University and needless to say our residential internet speeds are trash (ironic considering we are one of the tech capitals of the entire nation, and the internet is responsible for the majority of our cities wealth and growth.). We get 10 megabits down/up, and for $140 more per semester, we can upgrade to 20 megabits down/up. I emailed our residential office and they redirected me to whoever is in charge of the technology department at our school and they agreed with me that 10 megabits is not enough, and that by the end of winter break they are trying to raise their network capacity from 2 gigabits to 10.

 

The problem however is that so many of the people who are in charge of making decision are under the assumption that 10 megabits is enough to get our schoolwork done. In most cases, and with most people, that is true. The guy who I was in contact with asked me for some academic reasons for them to raise the internet speeds. I have come up with a few things so far, but I really want a strong arsenal of cases to provide to him. Please try to keep this post serious, and try to avoid saying things like "Gotta stream HD Pr0n" or whatever.

 

Thanks so much, I look forward to hearing what you guys have to say.

 

I hope I posted this in the right section, wasn't sure if this should go in the networking section, but the networking section was under hardware so...

[Tedster]

If you're trying to work with decent quality video with someone on the internet...

If you're trying to work with high-resolution photos across the internet...

 

Anything involving remoting into other machines will generally be better with a higher connection speed.

if you're doing anything like playing with different OSes (namely Linux distros) you could argue that you need to be able to download those more quickly.

If you're working with high quality sound files (FLACs for instance) you'll want a faster connection so you can download those more easily.

 

You could make the argument that the higher speeds would help you secure your data with online backup services.

 

Stuff about video calling/conferencing/collaborating on stuff online with services like Google Drive?

[Tataffe]

Our dorms got 2x10 GBit/s provided by the network of the university's super cumputer

 

Not enough to get me into the dorms, though. 50 MBit/s are fine I guess

[thekeemo]

10 is enough...

[dom1310df]

Wow, the really rip you off. At my uni we get 30 Mb/s symmetrical (and it is pretty much always that) for free. For £70 a year (2 semesters) I can upgrade to 70Mb/s symmetrical.

 

Hate to be in your shoes. It's taken me a whole day to download Forza 6 at 30Mb/s .

[Tedster]

Wow, the really rip you off. At my uni we get 30 Mb/s symmetrical (and it is pretty much always that) for free. For £70 a year (2 semesters) I can upgrade to 70Mb/s symmetrical.

 

Hate to be in your shoes. It's taken me a whole day to download Forza 4 at 30Mb/s .

Depending on how literally I take your post, you could be saying that Forza 4 is 324GB...

[-ism]

Wow, the really rip you off. At my uni we get 30 Mb/s symmetrical (and it is pretty much always that) for free. For £70 a year (2 semesters) I can upgrade to 70Mb/s symmetrical.

 

Hate to be in your shoes. It's taken me a whole day to download Forza 4 at 30Mb/s .

 

Yeah... and you really don't want to see how much my tuition costs I have a friend at UCLA and on move in day he had speeds as high as 700 mbps, but now he says it sits around 100 megabits. It took me 4-6 hours to download the SW:Battlefront beta which is only 10 gigs.

 

10 is enough...

10 megabits is approx. 1mB-1.1mB per second. It takes literally 12-15 minutes to download 1 gigabyte depending on the stability at the time.

 

It is NOT enough. I would expect speeds like that from a Starbucks or Airport connection. Thankfully our ping is very low, almost always less than 10.

[michaelocarroll007]

 

Yeah... and you really don't want to see how much my tuition costs I have a friend at UCLA and on move in day he had speeds as high as 700 mbps, but now he says it sits around 100 megabits. It took me 4-6 hours to download the SW:Battlefront beta which is only 10 gigs.

 

10 megabits is approx. 1mB-1.1mB per second. It takes literally 12-15 minutes to download 1 gigabyte depending on the stability at the time.

 

It is NOT enough. I would expect speeds like that from a Starbucks or Airport connection. Thankfully our ping is very low, almost always less than 10.

 

you do realize that is around the same as The national average in the US for a house and  your number is a per person of  10Mbps  which is almost always a good enough connection for one person. Listen i understand that its not fast and i would want more also but academically there's very little reasons to need more then that and if you have one it will be the minority Less then 5 % of people as how many students need to download a 5 gig file all the time. for playing online, streaming 1080p video and everything else its perfectly fine

 

idk about your experiances but most startbucks,airports,hotels i have used have been way worse then a 10Mbps of real use speeds though i have not tried one in a good while as my phones ussualy has over 30Mbps where i live and i have unlimited data   

[dom1310df]

Depending on how literally I take your post, you could be saying that Forza 4 is 324GB...

The XBOX doesn't max out the connection; the 30 Mb/s is shared with other devices, as in a typical house. It's actually only 45 GB.

 

(Should have also said Forza 6. Typo)

[thekeemo]

Yeah... and you really don't want to see how much my tuition costs I have a friend at UCLA and on move in day he had speeds as high as 700 mbps, but now he says it sits around 100 megabits. It took me 4-6 hours to download the SW:Battlefront beta which is only 10 gigs.

 

10 megabits is approx. 1mB-1.1mB per second. It takes literally 12-15 minutes to download 1 gigabyte depending on the stability at the time.

 

It is NOT enough. I would expect speeds like that from a Starbucks or Airport connection. Thankfully our ping is very low, almost always less than 10.

meanwhile in Egypt students are fine with 1mbps...

[KemoKa]

This is why I don't want to go to university in America. Asia and FTTP all the way.

[Universal_Cereal_Bus]

I am fortunate to regularly experience 25-55 MB/s (measured on steam) with a hard drive and opposite servers being the bottleneck at my university. There is basically no throttling done on our network because of the sheer amount of bandwidth available.

 

I must say; however, that unless you are doing research, you don't need more than 10 Mbps to the outside- that being a symmetrical connection makes it way better than a 20/5 connection in most usage cases such as email and web browsing.

 

To boot- $140 per semester for a measly upgrade is stupid- consumer ISPs offer that for wayyy less. A department subsidized by the state and by tuition should not be this anemic.

 

My guess is that the IT employees are really incompetent and too afraid to change old policies. A smart department would at least apply some QoS so that most people would retain their latency whilst emailing etc. they are probably also spending a significant amount of resources in throttling all these connections selectively. If they were to shut down torrent traffic and crack down on really heavy b/w users, it would yield faster speeds for anyone.

Also, I must ask- do you not have unlimited speed to local resources? ie. resources on the university server should not be limited to that speed- that would be ridiculous. If they are... then I'm going on a hunch and say that how muchever money is being poured into the IT department, it is not being used. You did mention that the speeds drop even below 10 Mbps- im guessing that hardware is really really old and either they are THAT incompetent or idk...

Do they have a wired network- if not , then thats a pretty valid reason for those limits. and the price... it would be justified to some extent. Every single university is fighting a war with wifi- its just stupidly imperfect for serving hundreds of people. esp 2.4G. our univ literally has been recommending 5G for the last 4 years. even with this amazing network we have, I have had problems logging in to a text based computer science test in a large classroom on my laptop. It was brutal- i didnt have 5g and i suffered for that.

So for stuff that is useful to YOU
1. At least unlimited access to local resources- pdfs and ppts are sometimes 50-100MB these days

2. Massively Online Courses- such as the MiT ones on youtube, coursera, khan academy
3. Program downloads- MATLAB, Adobe CC, even Microsoft Office would take a long time
4. Computer maintenance- windows updates alone- now that they are basically mandatory on win 10 will GUZZLE bandwidth 
5. Same with ios and android updates- computer maintenance is essential for academia- having that bottleneck actual work is a no-no - these updates are 300MB- 500MB even Gigs... 10 isnt enough for that

6. Also I know not everyone will see eye to eye with this- especially admins... but streaming video and downloading games and apps is essential to society, its no longer an exotic thing. In the past it was more common for people to buy discs, its not that entertainment wasnt consumed on campus- it just came from a different media. So saying that residential connections on univ should be limited to just work is an antiquated policy.

7. to further support, ipads and other mobile devices are common for notetaking- applications on those devices can also be considered a necessity for that. These are fairly large files!

I just want to say, that I do/did have a 12 Mbps/2Mbps down at home. Honestly, it wasn't bad at all. Even for downloading large programs- sure it isn't conducive to doing work AND play at the same time. But for work, it definitely enough- again, if you can get even 6 Mbps reliably, it really isn't terrible. I've done data mining for academia on a 3G connection in India and THAT was not a satisfactory connection.

My recommendation would be first to get them to establish reliability and consistency. Do hardware updates- which will be cheaper than it was years ago and it should lower costs- energy and maintenance. This should result in faster speeds- but it will take time. I don't think theres a fix that will take less than a few months.

[KemoKa]

you do realize that is around the same as The national average in the US for a house and  your number is a per person of  10Mbps  which is almost always a good enough connection for one person. Listen i understand that its not fast and i would want more also but academically there's very little reasons to need more then that and if you have one it will be the minority Less then 5 % of people as how many students need to download a 5 gig file all the time. for playing online, streaming 1080p video and everything else its perfectly fine

 

idk about your experiances but most startbucks,airports,hotels i have used have been way worse then a 10Mbps of real use speeds though i have not tried one in a good while as my phones ussualy has over 30Mbps where i live and i have unlimited data   

Yeah, the national average for the US is 48mbps. The US. The richest nation on earth. Wow.

You're behind fucking Uruguay.

I know an elderly couple living on the outskirts of the Tokyo Metropolitan Area, in what could only be described as "the country". They have one computer in the house. And they have 200/100 internet.

 

I could not pay CenturyLink any amount of money for those speeds. I could not pay Comcast for those speeds. Yet an elderly couple in Japan with a single Core 2 Celeron laptop that couldn't even saturate their internet connection if they wanted to, has access to over quadruple the average connection bandwidth in the entire USA. What does that tell you?

[Universal_Cereal_Bus]

Yeah, the national average for the US is 48mbps. The US. The richest nation on earth. Wow.

You're behind fucking Uruguay.

I know an elderly couple living on the outskirts of the Tokyo Metropolitan Area, in what could only be described as "the country". They have one computer in the house. And they have 200/100 internet.

 

 

Okay okay come on stop picking on capitalists. Where it really matters, the US has more that what it needs- and by that I mean that corporations and many universities have connections that are far superior to private citizens.

The reason as has been explained so many times is that the infrastructure was developed without any thought given to future upgrades- considering how low population density is in the US, its more difficult than bringing a single trunk line to a high rise.

You really can't compare tokyo in population density (not to mention the newer infrastructure- as there was no widespread infrastructure before that "in the country". Of course then the capitalist mentality steps in.

With the old infrastructure companies were struggling for excuses to find to not upgrade. They found one (two actually!),

DSL(now VDSL with bonding) and QAM!!!

Of course VDSL is pretty limited- up to 50ish Megs. QAM on the other hand.... well... Right now we are on QAM 256 in the US- remember QAM and VDSL require minimal upgrades to infrastructure. And QAM 256 can support around 300 Mbps on the same old cable wire from so many years ago (plus some shielding).

 

That sounds well and good... but why isn't comcast offering those speeds? It has something to do with no competitors being even close until recently. But even then- currently QAM 4096 is being formulated- it offers 3 times as much bandwidth as QAM 256. Will we see those speeds?

Well, I think you know that answer. So please don't blame the poor souls on this forum. The technology is there, we are just.... handicapped by our love of corporations. I'm sure i missed some things in my "explanation"- wuz busy. anyways lets focus on solutions so the actual question and not the worlds injustices and problems. 

[-ism]

 

 A department subsidized by the state and by tuition should not be this anemic.

 

 

I was told by the tech guy I emailed that they aren't given any funding from our tuition fees / government etc. the only funding they have is from our housing costs, which in San Francisco, are expensive as fuck. Approximately 4k-ish students live on campus paying $1300-1800 per month depending on what particular dorm they chose.

[dom1310df]

I was told by the tech guy I emailed that they aren't given any funding from our tuition fees / government etc. the only funding they have is from our housing costs, which in San Francisco, are expensive as fuck. Approximately 4k-ish students live on campus paying $1300-1800 per month depending on what particular dorm they chose.

$1300-$1800 per month for one person?

[-ism]

$1300-$1800 per month for one person?

 

It's fucking insane how much it costs to live on campus here. And yes, that's per person. People are cramming anywhere from 4-6 people into 2 and 3 bedroom apartments nearby campus. People are literally converting living rooms into bedrooms so they can have more people and cut down on the cost of living. Average price of rent can range from 750-1000 per person if you're living off campus, but there are a lucky few who can afford to spend 1100+ to have their own private room. Don't move to San Francisco if you're on a budget

[michaelocarroll007]

Yeah, the national average for the US is 48mbps. The US. The richest nation on earth. Wow.

You're behind fucking Uruguay.

I know an elderly couple living on the outskirts of the Tokyo Metropolitan Area, in what could only be described as "the country". They have one computer in the house. And they have 200/100 internet.

 

I could not pay CenturyLink any amount of money for those speeds. I could not pay Comcast for those speeds. Yet an elderly couple in Japan with a single Core 2 Celeron laptop that couldn't even saturate their internet connection if they wanted to, has access to over quadruple the average connection bandwidth in the entire USA. What does that tell you?

 

The average person does not have that there... and honestly in most populated areas you can get that but its expensive i have 100/50 and its $100 bucks a month 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Internet_connection_speeds 

http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2014/04/23/u-s-10th-in-average-internet-speed-rankings-s-korea-still-no-1/ 

[KingKeith55]

You can get gigabit speeds here in Canada. Just it's quite expensive. 96 Canadian dollars for 300/100 from Bell in my area. Gigabit is overpriced as shit though. It's like 150 dollars or something.

[xentric]

My dorms we got 100mbps up and 100mbps down (not all the time but it was never below 20mbps). Now they have upgraded and in some buildings we get 1gb down and 1gb up. But all internet traffic is monitor and your account will be banned for illegal downloading. Yes, you agree to those terms when you make an account.

 

The thing is the only time I got crazy speeds in the dorms when I was using the university server computers to do big data projects.

 

If you can access the school servers with a very high bandwidth then it's a hard argument. But if you can't then you have an argument.

[Universal_Cereal_Bus]

So I did some more digging- your residential net is managed by Apogee Telecom http://www.apogee.us/

 

http://www.sfsu.edu/~reslife/computerusageanddownloading.html

 

"University Housing offers a network system in partnership with Apogee Telecom, Inc. "

I also found this on apogee's website "

5. More Devices Mean More Support: Although Apple devices are still king, the need for comprehensive help services to troubleshoot other mobile devices still remains. Apogee expects that this trend will continue with new smartwatches and other smart objects making their foray into homes and on campus

 

Yeah... its going to be a tough battle with people who believe apple devices are "king"

I think it looks bleak for you tbh- these types of companies are pros - they manage many univs across the country- you wont get them to instantly give you more bandwidth.

[Universal_Cereal_Bus]

so judging from what ive seen- its basically like paying for your own internet- no different than comcast or att- because it isnt provided by your college.

[BuckGup]

My sister gets 958 down and 553 up.

[Universal_Cereal_Bus]

My sister gets 958 down and 553 up.

 

I don't get it... Are you trying to be sexist, unhelpful, elitist...or all three?

[BuckGup]

I don't get it... Are you trying to be sexist, unhelpful, elitist...or all three?

Yeah. No. I was just stating how colleges can get faster internet and they shouldn't have speeds close to mine when I live in the middle of no where Wisconsin