Now scores of colleges are fighting back with technology.
Buffalo State College is among schools that are limiting the capacity on the circuits that parcel data packets to residence halls during the day, when faculty and staff are on campus.
The idea is to give administrators enough network capacity to keep the campus running.
Colleges then expand the network pipes that connect the rest of the campus to dorms in the evening, when students are most likely to be sharing files with each other and over the Internet, said Judy Basinski, Buffalo State's associated vice president of computing services.
Wilson Craig, a spokesman for Packeteer, Inc., the California company that sells the line-provisioning technology, said about 600 American colleges and universities are using their PacketShaper program. Another 140 programs are also being used in elementary and high schools nationwide, he said.
The program narrows the flow of data to dorm-room computers like a valve restricting the flow of water through a hose.
Installation of the program has not jeopardized research and academic pursuits on campus networks, said Mark Luker, a senior policy analyst with Educause, an organization that monitors technology in higher education.
It also has not affected students' ability to send e-mail or access academic material such as professors' Web pages, said Kevin Talbert, CIO of technological services at Southern Oregon University.
The transmission of basic data files such as e-mail and Web pages don't degrade network performance as songs or movies do.
"Our experience thus far has been very good," said Talbert, who was responsible for installing the program at Southern Oregon this year.
Everyone's happy except students, like Buffalo State sophomore Carlene Peterson.
Last year, she downloaded up to three tunes a day onto her laptop: This semester, Peterson has yet to record a single song.
"Downloading songs is next to impossible," she said. "It takes terribly long."
An Iowa State University encryption expert says it's only a matter of time before students weaned on the Internet figure out how to widen the pipes -- and overwhelm campus technology supervisors.
"A lot of schools are barely sustaining their IT support systems," said Iowa State's Steffen Schmidt. Many are "extremely behind the curve on all this."
Kenneth C. Green, with the Campus Computing Project in Encino, Calif., a high technology advisory group, disagrees. He said colleges and universities deserve credit for staying abreast of developments in the technology sector.
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