Students will have to sacrifice the convenience of downloading their favorite song or movie off the Internet to gain faster, more reliable network service.

Many of the network’s slow service and unreliability has been connected to file sharing, giving other users access to files on a personal hard-drive system. File sharing is required to run programs like Napster or KaZaA, programs where people can swap music, movies or video files, said Tim Louis, network engineer.

Jeff Cooley, vice president of business affairs, said when people start to download files from other users, their computer is automatically utilized as a server.

“One computer can have as many as 1,000 connections from the outside world,” Lewis said.

“We are really providing Internet service to the world,” Cooley said.

Students can start downloading files and then go to class, leaving their computers on and jamming the system all day, he said.

The connections have been clogging the network and, to correct the problem, a firewall has been installed into the university network routers. The firewall filters the amount of file sharing allowed and gives priority to network functions used by students, administrators and faculty. E-mail, the Internet and the ethernet service will speed up now that file-sharing traffic has been cut down.

“This will definitely help alleviate some of the network problems,” Lewis said.

Last spring, the network started experiencing slow response times and, as more people started using the school’s server, administrators realized they had a real problem on their hands. Cooley said when workers isolated the problem they found over 90 percent of the available Internet pipe was consumed by file-sharing activity.

“It was causing our network to perform terribly,” Lewis said.

Cooley said the firewall may be turned down to filter out less file sharing during the evening, so people can still download files off the Internet. However, he felt it was important to give more people access to the Internet during peak class hours.

Currently, the firewall is in full effect all day, Lewis said.

“We are just trying to improve the use of the network for students, faculty and staff,” Cooley said.

Lewis said another solution could be buying more bandwidth, or room for information to run though. However, that may be a financial struggle.

“It’s all about money and someone has to pay for it,” he said. “No matter how big of a pipe you have, it’ll fill up.”