On-campus students closely monitoring their downloads and uploads can rest a bit easier, at least until the end of the semester.

Housing and Food Services and Information Technology Services (ITS) have worked together to increase the on-campus bandwidth limits from two gigabytes to four gigabytes per week on a trial-run basis for the rest of the spring semester.

Robin Anderson, the director for customer communications for ITS, said students have been clamoring for more bandwidth.

"If you just watch a YouTube video of any length, they tend to add up, and students who are doing online gaming ... some of this stuff just eats away at the two gig a month," she said.

Anderson said an e-mail was sent to on-campus students about the trial run this past weekend, and the change began Sunday.

As a part of the pilot, Anderson said any students who had prior violations will reset to zero. But if students should violate the four-gigabyte limit, regular violations will kick in.

There will probably never be unlimited bandwidth, Anderson said, because there is a cost, and the bandwidth has to be shared between students, faculty and staff.

"Think of it as a big pipe," she said. "Faculty and staff also share that pipeline, and if students had unlimited access, the faculty and staff wouldn't get access, so there has to be some sort of regulation."

As for the decision at the end of the semester, Anderson said ITS and Housing and Food Services are confident there shouldn't be any problems and will wait to see how it goes.

Joel Weidner, the director of information systems in auxiliary and business services, said it is important to remember that this four-gigabyte limit only counts for Web sites outside of the www.psu.edu domain.

He said it isn't a question of whether or not the Penn State network can handle the increase in bandwidth, but rather: Is there enough bandwidth being allocated to resident halls?

He said he saw a few positive e-mails in the general ResCom inbox, but added that it's still too early to gauge student response.

David Macey, a resident assistant in Packer Hall, said he learned to deal with only two gigabytes but that some of his residents had problems with the bandwidth limit.

"Sometimes I go over just downloading stuff, but it's a matter of watching," he said. "Sometimes it's more of an issue and sometimes it's not."

He said if the server can handle it, he thinks the four-gigabyte trial period will be great.

"There's always more stuff to download for classes and more media to get," he said.

Brittany Barillaro (sophomore-kinesiology) said she never even got close to the two-gigabyte limit.

"It doesn't affect me, but I'm sure other people are happy about it," she said.

Rob Herring (freshman-engineering) said he only monitors his bandwidth usage when he gets e-mail warnings. He said he wants the four-gigabyte limit to become the standard.

"Once they give it, they can't take it away, hopefully," he said.