Internet Bandwidth at Eastern Nazarene College

To date, there has been some confusion about ENC's network structure and how it relates to the internet. This confusion stems from the fact that for the vast majority of users "the network" literally means "the internet". Most of us view those little data jacks in our dorms or offices as simply a portal - or stepping stone - to communicating with others across the country and the globe. But the internet itself is only a part of the network picture here at ENC: ENC Network

The most basic part is the data jack in your dorm room or your mobile laptop and the network devices they connect to in our wiring closets throughout campus. This, combined with our server computers and software housed in the main data center in the ground floor of Gardner Hall, put all the essential pieces in place that enable you to just "plug in and go".

Many frequently-used network services at ENC such as enc.edu, WebMail , campus directory , Nease Library website, network printing and storage, moodle, and others are all "locally" available, assuming you are situated locally as well, in your dorm room or office. In these cases, your network experience never takes you past the Gardner Hall data center.

Needless to say, the performance and "speediness" of all the local network services at ENC are pretty darn good - and they should be, since we're a small, tight-knit campus. But not so when accessing the internet. Simply put, accessing any network resource, usually a website, that doesn't have "enc.edu" somewhere in its name requires traversing the internet.

Internet Bandwidth - explained

Bandwidth means simply the rate at which data can be transmitted over a physical medium such as a network cable or radio wave. The bandwidth from your dorm room jack to the Gardner data center tops out at 100 megabits per second. To represent this in terms more easily understood:

Here's a file being download with Firefox. The file is located right here on the ITS website, on a server in the Gardner data center. Go ahead and download it.

The file is 62 megabytes in size and will download to you in just a few seconds. Notice from the download meter above that the transfer rate is nearly 6000 kilobytes - or 6 megabytes - per second! Very fast. However, the same file being downloaded to a computer off-campus would look like this:

This is more like what we are used to - waiting ten or twenty minutes (or longer) for a file this size to download.

Its useful now to understand what we mean by megabit, kilobyte, megabyte, etc. When measuring bandwidth, we use prefixes such as kilo and mega together with binary numerals. To confuse things even more, we often switch between measuring in bits...

kilobit (kb)	1000 bits
megabit (Mb)	1000 kilobits
gigabit (Gb)	1000 megabits

byte (b)	8 bits
kilobyte (KB)	1000 bytes
megabyte (MB)	1000 kilobytes
gigabyte (GB)	1000 megabytes

As you may have guessed by now, these same terms used to measure bandwidth are also used to measure the data storage capacity of different computer hardware. In general, the storage capacity of devices such as hard drives, writable CDs and mp3 players are measured in bytes, while the bandwidth capacity of network connections such as your dorm port, wireless link and home dialup connection are measured in bits . This is simply because advances in computer hardware have far outstripped buildouts in network infrastructure, and its more convenient to put the larger "byte" label on storage products and the smaller "bit" label on bandwidth products. But this isn't always the case. Again, take our download meter:

This cute little meter is probably the number one cause of confusion about bandwidth for the average internet user. The transfer rate here is labeled in bytes (57 KiloBytes per second), not bits. If you didn't know better, you might exclaim to yourself: "Why, I paid good money for this home DSL connection that they claimed was 3 megs! How come my download is only 57 kilobytes a second?"

The reason is that your ISP is refering to 3 megabits, not megabytes. So, using our charts above, we can calculate that 57 kilobytes per second equals 456 kilobits per second. Now, this is still far shy of 3mbps, but we need to remember that the internet is a two-way street, and that the sites you download from may not be able to match you megabit-for-megabit.

Also, ISPs often exagerate their connection speeds, hiding all sorts of caveats in the fine print, the upshot of which is that "3 megs" usually means "up to 3 megs". Rarely will a home user experience bandwidth consistently at that level.

Bandwidth at ENC

Bandwidth figures at ENC vary substantially depending on:

Obviously the biggest choke point is ENC's internet connection, not your dorm or office ports, or even your wireless link. Unfortunately, it is the internet that most people want to access, so it can quickly become saturated - and stay saturated - for most of the day.

It is our experince here in ITS that, when patrons complain to us that "the nework is slow" or "the internet is crawling" or (in even less civilized language) "ENC's internet stinks", it is not the local network or internet link itself that is the problem, but too many people trying to use too much of a very scarce resource - internet bandwidth.

Information vs. Infotainment

We in ITS have been well aware of the rapidly growing demand for faster internet bandwidth at ENC, and we have been aggressively seeking to:

Both of these require significant investments in time, effort and money. We in ITS are happy to do this since we are a service organization dedicated to the educational and spiritual mission of the college.

However, we know that a large portion of student network use at ENC is not for informational or educational purposes, but for entertainment, some of it contrary to official acceptable use. It is part of our duty in ITS to uphold and enforce the policies of the college as they pertain to the use of network and computing resources. In pursuit of this we may sometimes have to play "the bad guy". Unfortunately, this is a necessity.

We live in a technologically dynamic and evolving world, and college campuses are often "ground zero" for the use of new network technologies. The challenge of keeping our management of ENC's computing infrastructure a few steps ahead of reality can be daunting at times, though we do our best to meet it every day.