I pay for internet and intend to use it!

When you move into the AUC dorms, part of your housing fee goes towards the internet connection. Unlike in previous semesters, you have no choice of service providers, or service levels. For better or for worse, you get NetStar's lowest level of service. Actually, you get lower than the lowest, because if you live off campus, you are not sharing your bandwidth with as many people! What we are getting is a maximum of 256kbps, per room. I have monitored my usage, however, and almost never get anything higher than 100kbps, and those are fleeting moments.

To make matters worse, not only are we getting only a maximum of 256, but what we are getting is being "prioritized." This is NetStar's word to describe the method in which P2P applications, YouTube, and some other sites, are being severely limited in available bandwidth. However, "prioritized" is not the correct word to describe what they are doing. What they are doing is throttling our bandwidth...telling us how much we can or cannot use for certain applications. Even if they were to hypothetically allot every student 10mbps (about the amount the entire campus is getting), P2P, YouTube, and some others, would still run just as slow. I find this unacceptable since at no point were we told that we could only use the internet for certain things or given any option in the matter. If I had known about the current internet setup before, I would not have lived in the dorms.

In any case, I have found a solution to the throttling problem (for P2P apps). It's very simple...just enable encryption on your P2P client. If you're using a mac, the newest version of Transmission supports encryption, and does it automatically. If you're not using a mac, get one. Or, use uTorrent, which also support encryption. The minute that I relaunched the updated Transmission client, my download speeds went from ranging around 0.8-4 kbps to 60-80 kbps! Happy downloading...

With encryption enabled, the internet provider does not know what, specifically, your connection is doing. Since, they can't identify it as P2P activity (or anything else that they're throttling), they can't block it. While Comcast has figured a way around this, it is highly unlikely that NetStar will!