Students living on campus will no longer be able to download an unlimited amount of data to their computers.

Starting Monday, Penn State will limit the number of gigabytes on-campus students may download from online sources outside of the university's domain.

Joel Weidner, associate director of information systems for auxiliary and business services, said the university may also consider curbing future student access to peer-to-peer sharing networks.

"We're not looking at any of the content, but we're assuming a lot of the traffic's being generated by peer-to-peer sharing like Napster and KaZaA," he said.

The Office of Housing and Food Service Operations and the Office of Telecommunications devised the downloading limitation to discourage the disproportionate consumption of bandwidth by what Weidner called "high-end users."

A weeklong survey last year found that 247 students downloaded 9.14 mega bits per second, or 18.3 percent, of the 50 mega bits per second allocated to the dorm networks. These users are the cause of slowed online computer activity, Weidner said.

The new limitation is similar to last semester's monitoring of uploads. The first two violations of the limitation will result in the reduction of the user connection to 56 kilobits per second, equivalent to the speed of a dial-up modem. The third violation will result in a semester-long speed restriction, and the fourth violation will result in the loss of the user's network connection.

Students will be permitted to download 1.5 gigabytes of data per week. That amount of data is equivalent to about 300 mp3s, which are music files downloaded online. With a limit of 1.5 gigabytes of data per week, a student would not be able to download an entire DVD movie, Weidner said.

In regard to text, 1.5 gigabytes can allow a user to download as many as 37,000 10-page Microsoft Word documents.

"Text e-mails and documents aren't going to generate the kind of traffic that we're talking about," Weidner said. "When you get into things like pictures, sound files and movie files, those things use up gigabytes pretty easily."

Several students, such as Justin Eleazer (freshman-management), object to the imminent limitation.

"The university views our Internet connection as a strictly educational tool. They're forgetting that this is also our home," Eleazer said. "Recreational Internet use should be considered when making these decisions."

Eleazer said the restrictions are unfair because students, particularly freshmen who must spend their first year on campus, are not offered a choice in the matter. He suggests that Penn State could offer more bandwidth to individual students who are willing to pay extra in order to pursue hobbies such as online gaming or downloading movies.

Jeremy Vallimont (freshman-premedicine) believes limiting any student's downloading is unreasonable.

Relating his experience with last semester's uploading restriction, he said Penn State warned him twice for uploading too much data, although the download-upload meter configured to his computer told him he was within the data limits. The warnings were the only action taken against him.

"They never restricted me either," Vallimont said. "There's not much faith in the current system."

Under the provisions of the new limitation, students will be sent a warning notification via e-mail once they have used 60 percent of their allotted weekly gigabytes.

The decision to implement individual controls on student downloading was made by OTC, Housing and the Association of Residence Hall Students, a group that provided the university with student input.

"We're hoping that by limiting everybody to 1.5 gigabytes per week, we'll be able to cut down on the high-end users and make bandwidth more accessible to everyone," Weidner said.