- May 31, 2004
- 3,147
- 96
- 91
OK everyone, I've been frustrated by this problem ever since I came here, and I need some help with figuring out what the best thing to do is...
I'm at Iowa State University (with its full name being The Iowa State University of Science and Technology). Its a Big 12 school, state school obviously, supposedly a great computer department, etc....
Too bad the internet connection is just plain bad...
Well, i take that back, it almost seems like the connection is just very very picky about where it goes. If i look on the internet servers in Steam, the VAST majority of servers (maybe 4/5 or 9/10's), are over 400-500 ping, with a few being 100-200 and even less being sub 100. Even those servers that ARE pinging very well are (at least IMO) very unstable, jumping from 40-50 then up to ~200 then down, with occasional jumps to >1000. Also, servers that at the beginning of the year i was pinging excellent to, are now 500....the same goes true for hosting games, clients from outside of iastate ping roughly 500-600... :
Its pretty sluggish outside of the gaming arena as well....even say, checking someones away message on AIM takes a few seconds as opposed to instantly coming up on a residential broadband connect.
Now, the interesting part is that when i go to download files off the net, some files go incredibly slow, ~4-5 kb/s, but then some, such as last night downloading the new drivers off the ATI website, 1.5 MB/s...
According to the university, we all got charged extra this year to have double the bandwidth from last year (it was a campuswide vote if i remember right, so its not like they just "added a charge")....the change was noticible at the beginning of the year, but now its worse than it ever was...
Here's my theory, which is most probably wrong as my knowledge of networking is VERY small, but...Could it be possible that they have enough bandwidth, as far as the actual cables, going into and out of the campus, but the routers just cant keep up with the amount of requests? This seems like why it would make sense with small packets that need to be updated constantly, like CS and gaming, and still be a fast connection for constant connection things like file transfering...
Also, this problem only seems to happen in the dorms. I had a friend from texas do a traceroute to my IP, he said that he was pinging great into the university, then he hit the dorm servers, when it all went downhill...which makes sense, especially with things like ares, kazaa, and the like.
I'm considering emailing the president of the university saying that this poor of a connection is pretty inexcusable for a school this big, but i just thought id ask for some of your opinions before i went ahead and did that.
OH by the way, I've called the computer department regarding this and all i ever get is "oh no, the internet connection is fine, its probably you" or something like that...however EVERY person on campus has that problem.
Can anyone think of other reasons why this could be happening?
Thanks a ton guys, this discussion board is awesome : ).
-Chap
I'm at Iowa State University (with its full name being The Iowa State University of Science and Technology). Its a Big 12 school, state school obviously, supposedly a great computer department, etc....
Too bad the internet connection is just plain bad...
Well, i take that back, it almost seems like the connection is just very very picky about where it goes. If i look on the internet servers in Steam, the VAST majority of servers (maybe 4/5 or 9/10's), are over 400-500 ping, with a few being 100-200 and even less being sub 100. Even those servers that ARE pinging very well are (at least IMO) very unstable, jumping from 40-50 then up to ~200 then down, with occasional jumps to >1000. Also, servers that at the beginning of the year i was pinging excellent to, are now 500....the same goes true for hosting games, clients from outside of iastate ping roughly 500-600... :
Its pretty sluggish outside of the gaming arena as well....even say, checking someones away message on AIM takes a few seconds as opposed to instantly coming up on a residential broadband connect.
Now, the interesting part is that when i go to download files off the net, some files go incredibly slow, ~4-5 kb/s, but then some, such as last night downloading the new drivers off the ATI website, 1.5 MB/s...
According to the university, we all got charged extra this year to have double the bandwidth from last year (it was a campuswide vote if i remember right, so its not like they just "added a charge")....the change was noticible at the beginning of the year, but now its worse than it ever was...
Here's my theory, which is most probably wrong as my knowledge of networking is VERY small, but...Could it be possible that they have enough bandwidth, as far as the actual cables, going into and out of the campus, but the routers just cant keep up with the amount of requests? This seems like why it would make sense with small packets that need to be updated constantly, like CS and gaming, and still be a fast connection for constant connection things like file transfering...
Also, this problem only seems to happen in the dorms. I had a friend from texas do a traceroute to my IP, he said that he was pinging great into the university, then he hit the dorm servers, when it all went downhill...which makes sense, especially with things like ares, kazaa, and the like.
I'm considering emailing the president of the university saying that this poor of a connection is pretty inexcusable for a school this big, but i just thought id ask for some of your opinions before i went ahead and did that.
OH by the way, I've called the computer department regarding this and all i ever get is "oh no, the internet connection is fine, its probably you" or something like that...however EVERY person on campus has that problem.
Can anyone think of other reasons why this could be happening?
Thanks a ton guys, this discussion board is awesome : ).
-Chap
Facebook
Twitter