I'm glad I don't do networking

This story talks about this fall's technology surprise at the University of Texas: students setting up their own hotspots. At first, I thought it was mostly a technology surprise, and interference with the sanctioned wi-fi network. So I imagined students getting their own hotspots and plugging them into their dorm rooms' ethernet jacks. But the ZD story mentions that:

In the University of Texas case, some students signed up for fast cable modem or DSL (digital subscriber line) service instead of using the slower campus wireless network. To defray those costs, they share their connections with other students by setting up private Wi-Fi based networks.

So the real issue is the students are dis-satisfied with the service they're getting from the campus network. Whether it's a problem with the wired or wireless network, I won't speculate. Either way, if campus officials speed up their network, the problem would probably go away.

I remember being at a small school in Seattle where file sharing traffic in the dorms was crushing the rest of campus. At the time I was trying to download a Linux distribution and it was taking several days. The network folks' solution was to throttle the dorm traffic and preserve bandwidth for the 'business' part of campus. It must not have been good enough, because shortly after I left the department divorced itself from the campus IT folks and bought their own bandwidth to share among 35 student workstations.

It was about this time that I learned an axiom of campus computing: No matter how fast we add bandwidth, students will learn new and exciting ways to play games, steal media, and look at porn.