IRHA bill may limit Internet use
November 1, 2000
The Inter-Residence Hall Association will introduce a bill tonight proposing to lower the amount of information sent from the ISU network.
The new policy was created by the Academic Information Technologies, said Union Drive Association at-large David Boike, co-author of the bill. The policy will limit ISU students’ outgoing connections.
“According to the policy as it now stands, it would limit the amount of information that a resident could send from their computer to someplace outside Iowa State to 200 megabytes per day,” he said.
Boike said the policy is in response to a small population of ISU students in the residence system who are using several gigabytes per day. One gigabyte equals about 1,000 megabytes, he said.
The policy is nothing new to Iowa State, said Director of Special Events Pat Blair, co-author of the bill. The average users should not have their access to the Internet tightened because of a small amount people sending out “unreasonable” amounts of megabytes, he said.
“IRHA does not support limiting of Internet access. Currently about 20 people are using the network for activity that it was non designed for, and they are limiting other people’s access,” he said. “We want to stop that.”
Once students connect their computers to the network, Heerema said, they must remember to use the network sparingly, said co-author Matt Heerema, Towers Residence Association at-large.
“The ethics agreement, which we all agreed to the minute we hooked up to ISU’s network, states that we will all conserve the limited computer resources on campus, to minimize our impact on each other’s work,” he said.
He said some examples of network overload would be excessive game playing or file transferring.
Boike said they will support the policy, but he said they would like to make some changes and increase the 200-megabyte limit to 500 megabytes.
“Our bill supports the policy but it states that we think the limit would be just as effective if it was 500 megabytes and that we think several areas of it are vague,” he said.
