WPI has always been proud of its connectivity in an increasingly wired world. Continuously ranked high in connectivity ratings among colleges and universities, WPI has kept up with trends in the networking world.
Lately, with the advent of better quality video and audio content on the web, bandwidth has become a very big issue. DSL and cable modems are gaining popularity in the residential sector because the need for bandwidth is growing exponentially. To keep up, faster and faster connections are being implemented everywhere, and WPI is no exception.
WPI was previously connected to the internet via 5 T1 lines provided by Qwest, a major internet service provider now across the entire country. This gave WPI a maximum in and out bandwidth of 960 kilobytes per second, which was not enough for the entire school. During the first month, the maximum in bandwidth was being used from 8am to 4am every day, the only break being in the very early morning hours. On September 22nd, WPI connected to Qwest's OC3 line (19.4 megabytes/second) in the Worcester GigaPoP. WPI has purchased a DS3 commodity in this line, which will provide us with 5.5 megabytes per second of both inbound and outbound traffic, or approximately five and a half times as much bandwidth as was available prior to the OC3's installation. The other part of the OC3 line is going to be used for the Intenet2 project, so will be unavailable starting this week. As of today, WPI is using about 2.5 megabytes per second, or a little under 50percent of the total available for the DS3 line, so the new line should be adequate for the time being.
Since only half of the available bandwidth is now being used, it may be possible for software like Napster to be available for use again at WPI. Last weekend, Napster was unblocked for an entire day, and during that day the full capacity of the DS3 feed was never at its maximum. Although this is not a reliable measure in and of itself, since bandwidth problems were cited as the reason for shutting down Napster last year, questions are being raised in public forums about Network Operations complying and unblocking Napster now that WPI may have sufficient bandwidth to support it.