Truth, Computing and Fail

With much hype and publicity, the wifi service of our university was launched 10 days ago. The service was christened I-ON (no idea what that has got to do with wireless networking) and large, beautiful posters greeted you on every step inside the campus: inside the hostels, the college, the lecture halls and all other places imaginable and within the reach of the human physique. It promised to Mobify ur world and according to the fkin fully techno illiterate helpdesk personnel, you would be getting speeds around 500 kbps. So, the first few days went fine, we were downloading and surfing merrily at speeds touching 50 KB/s. Anyways we were very well aware that a speed of 500 kbps is not feasible and possible for the size of the network and the backbone our university possesses. But still the speeds were simply great.
And then comes the shocker. Some 3 days back, suddenly everything drops and starts to suck, big time. Downloads drop to 6 KB/s. So what is it? As obvious it can get, its a nasty traffic shaper. The University gets back to its dirty tricks. You decide for yourself. 6 KB/s. Fucking hell. I would be getting the same speed on a dial up connection. For God’s sake, it is an internet service for the whole University. What can be more shameful that a University with 50+ years of history behind can’t offer a basic, decent internet connection to its students. Everything is simply wrong about the whole thing. To download even a small tool like Brutus, I’ve to wait 5 minutes and yes, that is if I stop whatever surfing I might be doing at that time. What purpose would this connection serve?

Agreed that traffic shapers are very much needed for maintaining the QoS of the network, but the University authorities have simply pulled off a cheap trick by misusing the powers of these tools.

In my next post, I’ll be posting some iperf results as evidence to my claims.