Penn State is not cutting its bandwidth. In fact, since 1986 Penn State has been increasing its bandwidth capacity at least annually to meet rising demands. Earlier this year the university's Internet circuits were tripled in capacity.

The University's overall bandwidth capacity serving over 100,000 users (15,000 of which are located in the residence halls) continues to be robust. The real problem is that a relatively small number of users are impacting the larger community.

It is vital for the university to ensure that all members of its community have access to the bandwidth they need to support the expanding range of electronically-based academic activities. The Office of Telecommunications, Office of Housing and Residential Life, Association of Residence Hall Students, and the Council of Commonwealth Student Governments worked together to plan an automated approach to concerns about excessive use of Penn State's bandwidth. This fall, unexpectedly heavy downloads from within the residence halls were making it increasingly difficult for all Penn State community members to access and effectively use the Internet to support their class work and research efforts.

It's important to note that the Council of Commonwealth Student Governments participated in developing Penn State's solution to the bandwidth issue and has been supportive of the measures that have been instituted.

Each student's residence hall network connection is afforded a weekly allocation of 1.5 billion characters of outbound network information transfer. Students who exceed their individual weekly allocations are subject to automatically issued warnings along with the eventual reduction of their connection speeds.

During the spring semester, we will begin managing inbound network information transfer for each student's residence hall connection.