The University has implemented a formal process for making sure that all students have fair access to the Internet from the residence halls and from other campus locations.

"The University's network provides high-speed access for students in the residence halls, yet students report slow Internet connections and problems contacting off-campus web sites," Betsy MacKenzie, IT-Help Center, said.

"We have found that students who use distributed file-sharing services to download movies, music and software use excessive network resources, preventing their hall mates from having full access to the network," she added.

Many students don't know that once they've used Aimster, KaZaA, Morpheus, BearShare or other distributed server applications to download a file, their computers become file servers visible to the rest of the Internet.

"Even if you haven't downloaded anything recently, these file-sharing programs run in the background, serving files to users all over the Internet. Our network is neither designed nor intended for this kind of use," she said.

Students whose computers upload and download more than 1GB of data in a day receive e-mail indicating that their access to the Internet has been severely restricted.

"These students still have full access to on-campus network resources, but the speed of their off-campus access drops by over 99 percent," MacKenzie said.

These limits stay in place until offenders contact the IT-Help Center and indicate:

• what software they are running that is generating the excessive network traffic
  
  
• that they will disable or remove this software from their computers
  
  
• that they understand how this software has had an impact on the other 7,500 residence hall students
  
  
• that they will not repeat the abuse of the University's network resources, and
  
  
• that a repeat offense will be referred to the Student Judicial System.
  
  

"We view this program as part of the process of educating UD students about the network and how all of our use affects it. The vast majority of the students we talk to are quite willing to comply," MacKenzie said.