My University has blocked online gaming

[Owyn_Merrilin]

I actually agree with them here.

It's a shared broadband. How would you feel if you were madly trying to research something for a project and the internet was being beaten by a cripple snail? Then you find out it's because someone was playing CoD? I'd be fucking fuming.

No matter how fast you think their net is, when you start divvying it up for hundreds of people. All wanting to use it. Not surprised they don't allow it.

Although I'm not keen on them monitoring your activity. I know they have to. But I'd never feel comfortable knowing some git downstairs was looking at the website I was on.

I think you're severely overestimating how much bandwidth online gaming takes. Watching videos on youtube takes up a lot more, and I can guarantee you his school doesn't block those. With online gaming, all that's being transferred is some cartesian coordinates, information about hit detection, and numbers involving changes in things like health and ammo capacity. A one megabit connection is more than sufficient for gaming, and you can just about do it on 56K -- in fact, older games with better optimized netcode worked just fine on 56K, and the amount of data being transferred hasn't really increased all that much, the programmers have just gotten lazier about optimizing their netcode, because nearly universal broadband makes it less of an issue. Universities tend to have direct links to the internet backbone, so online gaming is going to take a laughably small amount of the available bandwidth.

 

[Kakashi on crack]

Well, to put it in perspective, lets look at my high school's district that uses an industrial-strength connection.

You have thousands of people running on a connection, so lets say you have a 100 mbs connection, well, with 100 people using it at once you'll technically only have a 1mbs connection. (or maybe I'm thinking the way phones work)

Even on a connection that powerful, and ignoring the fact that there are so many people connected at once causing it to slow down, think of memory.

any kind of game takes up a lot of memory in online play from the internet connection. I'd guess a server that strong has about, ohh... lets say 1 terabyte of data.

Now, think of how one movie can be as much as 10 gigs, and how a game can take up 10 gigs of memory with a few hours of play.

Now, multiply that by thousands of students. NOW realize that the gig cap for some of the best connections in the U.S. is around 350 gigs then they begin to charge you out the ass for extra services.

Yes, it sucks, but if you want public internet, you have to make some sacrifices to accomplish it. The school could always charge students to use services such as video streaming/online gaming to cover the extra costs, but overall its easier to just say "no."


EDIT: Also, to put it in simpler terms: Their school, their internet, their rules. Deal with it

 

[kebab4you]

games taking up a lot of broadband? I can run ~10 computer with games running on 8MBit broadband and still have decent connection, they blowing smoke up your ass.

 

[Jamous]

Say it with me now. Anyway, I can see why they would have. However, if you're paying for broadband (I think you are? You sound like you are.) you should probably be able to at least see if you can get -some-. I wish you the best of luck my friend.

 

[YawningAngel]

Here is a short public service announcement for the terminally stupid. Online games use up an amount of bandwidth approximately equal to fuckall. My last game of hon used up 4.16 MB, which is equal to 130s of normal-quality MP3 or 16.64s of reasonable quality video. Gaming uses up almost no bandwidth, please stop saying it's a major drain.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

Well, to put it in perspective, lets look at my high school's district that uses an industrial-strength connection.

You have thousands of people running on a connection, so lets say you have a 100 mbs connection, well, with 100 people using it at once you'll technically only have a 1mbs connection. (or maybe I'm thinking the way phones work)

Even on a connection that powerful, and ignoring the fact that there are so many people connected at once causing it to slow down, think of memory.

any kind of game takes up a lot of memory in online play from the internet connection. I'd guess a server that strong has about, ohh... lets say 1 terabyte of data.

Now, think of how one movie can be as much as 10 gigs, and how a game can take up 10 gigs of memory with a few hours of play.

Now, multiply that by thousands of students. NOW realize that the gig cap for some of the best connections in the U.S. is around 350 gigs then they begin to charge you out the ass for extra services.

Yes, it sucks, but if you want public internet, you have to make some sacrifices to accomplish it. The school could always charge students to use services such as video streaming/online gaming to cover the extra costs, but overall its easier to just say "no."

Read my post above; you're way overestimating how much bandwidth games take up. The network traffic is measured in kilobytes, not gigabytes. Look at <link=http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php/20154-How-much-bandwidth-would-be-used-by-online-gaming?s=78b6c201b3f2d64888042ddf82408265>this thread. A good estimate for average bandwidth usage from an online game is about 20 megabytes an hour. Do you have any idea how small that is? A university connection can usually get that much to an end user in under a second, even when working under a heavy load. Online gaming takes up absolutely piddling amounts of bandwidth. Now, downloading full games and patches takes up a fair amount of bandwidth, but even then it's still comparable to what you get by streaming HD videos, and gamers tend to download whole games less often than TV junkies watch HD videos. That school has some seriously mixed priorities, unless of course they blocked gaming for some other reason, and the stated one is just a convenient excuse; that would make much more sense, because the stated reason just doesn't hold up under any amount of scrutiny.

 

[cookyy2k]

Actually, I'm not sure. If he's paying for internet service, there are things like net neutrality laws in place, and there may be an argument there about consumer rights. A campus with dorms where students actually pay for the internet access as part of their fees is very different from, say, a community college that nobody actually lives at.

The fundamental thing is that it is the university's network, thus they reserve the rights to dictate how it might be used. You might have to pay for the internet as part of tuition, but that doesn't mean that you should get full reigns over its use. Your argument is akin to saying that it is a violation of one's consumer rights if the dormitories to do not allow pets despite the fact the individual paid for the usage of the dorms. This really just goes to show how meaningless the term "consumer's rights" is quickly becoming. It's always been a pretty nebulous term, but now it is nebulous and meaningless. The constant misuse of the term will just drive it into mockery and parody. I can understated your personal investment in such a problem, but accusing this practice of violating some nebulous right that may or may not exist is not the way to go out and prove it is a bad policy.

Like I said, if the OP doesn't like it, then he should transfer. If you don't like their policies, then don't give them your business. Or just move off campus.

Do the words "ISP" and "Net Neutrality" mean anything to you? There are laws about what ISPs can and cannot do in regards to throttling traffic, and there are quite literal consumer rights involved. There's no law that says a landlord can't ban pets.

They are not an ISP though, it is a university network that they connect to the internet. They can put whatever restrictions they want on your usage of their network.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

Actually, I'm not sure. If he's paying for internet service, there are things like net neutrality laws in place, and there may be an argument there about consumer rights. A campus with dorms where students actually pay for the internet access as part of their fees is very different from, say, a community college that nobody actually lives at.

The fundamental thing is that it is the university's network, thus they reserve the rights to dictate how it might be used. You might have to pay for the internet as part of tuition, but that doesn't mean that you should get full reigns over its use. Your argument is akin to saying that it is a violation of one's consumer rights if the dormitories to do not allow pets despite the fact the individual paid for the usage of the dorms. This really just goes to show how meaningless the term "consumer's rights" is quickly becoming. It's always been a pretty nebulous term, but now it is nebulous and meaningless. The constant misuse of the term will just drive it into mockery and parody. I can understated your personal investment in such a problem, but accusing this practice of violating some nebulous right that may or may not exist is not the way to go out and prove it is a bad policy.

Like I said, if the OP doesn't like it, then he should transfer. If you don't like their policies, then don't give them your business. Or just move off campus.

Do the words "ISP" and "Net Neutrality" mean anything to you? There are laws about what ISPs can and cannot do in regards to throttling traffic, and there are quite literal consumer rights involved. There's no law that says a landlord can't ban pets.

They are not an ISP though, it is a university network that they connect to the internet. They can put whatever restrictions they want on your usage of their network.

Except that with university internet, the university itself almost always is the ISP. They have a direct connection to the internet backbone, they don't farm it out to Comcast.

 

[nifedj]

I'm in the process of applying to university right now, and while looking at accommodation I noticed that different unis sometimes have completely different policies about internet usage. I'm in the UK (Scotland, specifically) and it seemed that the strict ones all used a system called ResNet - so the people at your uni might not have control over what is and isn't blocked, as it might just be part of the externally designed system they use.

At the end of the day, if their policy was on their website (as it has been with the universities I've looked at) you probably should have known. Then you wouldn't have had a bad surprise. You're there to learn, mainly, so while I would want to be able to play online at uni, people shouldn't assume that their internet connection has no strings attached.

 

[Glademaster_v1legacy]

To be honest yes I do think it is fair as how about they let everyone game online and download music/movies? Yes the latter is much more stressful than the former but still how many people are in your college? I think something like a couple of thousand people on the internet playing games(depending on size of college) will drain the internet resources that would be better used elsewhere.

To be honest you are better without it.

 

[ruben6f]

Not fair but you have to deal with it, since they care so much about their precious speed, you can start a bunch of torrents just to slow down stuff. =D

 

[cookyy2k]

Actually, I'm not sure. If he's paying for internet service, there are things like net neutrality laws in place, and there may be an argument there about consumer rights. A campus with dorms where students actually pay for the internet access as part of their fees is very different from, say, a community college that nobody actually lives at.

The fundamental thing is that it is the university's network, thus they reserve the rights to dictate how it might be used. You might have to pay for the internet as part of tuition, but that doesn't mean that you should get full reigns over its use. Your argument is akin to saying that it is a violation of one's consumer rights if the dormitories to do not allow pets despite the fact the individual paid for the usage of the dorms. This really just goes to show how meaningless the term "consumer's rights" is quickly becoming. It's always been a pretty nebulous term, but now it is nebulous and meaningless. The constant misuse of the term will just drive it into mockery and parody. I can understated your personal investment in such a problem, but accusing this practice of violating some nebulous right that may or may not exist is not the way to go out and prove it is a bad policy.

Like I said, if the OP doesn't like it, then he should transfer. If you don't like their policies, then don't give them your business. Or just move off campus.

Do the words "ISP" and "Net Neutrality" mean anything to you? There are laws about what ISPs can and cannot do in regards to throttling traffic, and there are quite literal consumer rights involved. There's no law that says a landlord can't ban pets.

They are not an ISP though, it is a university network that they connect to the internet. They can put whatever restrictions they want on your usage of their network.

Except that with university internet, the university itself almost always is the ISP. They have a direct connection to the internet backbone, they don't farm it out to Comcast.

From personal experience of my halls days my university sold you network access from your room, their network was then connected to the internet by NTL, this means I was paying for and abiding by the rules to access the uni's network not the internet. The uni had the deal with the ISP not me. My uni did ban things such as streaming video and torrents as well as gaming. This was a university of 12,000 all halls were flats of 5 rooms, if each room had one xbox, play station or pc that gives 2400 potential online games at peak times (everyone will play at similar times) that will slow the network even if online gaming only takes little bandwidth. My uni did however allow local servers to be set up as the network was much faster than the internet connection and this was what we had, worked well for multiplayer since as mentioned above you could have 1000 devises or more connected so the popular titles had busy servers.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

Actually, I'm not sure. If he's paying for internet service, there are things like net neutrality laws in place, and there may be an argument there about consumer rights. A campus with dorms where students actually pay for the internet access as part of their fees is very different from, say, a community college that nobody actually lives at.

The fundamental thing is that it is the university's network, thus they reserve the rights to dictate how it might be used. You might have to pay for the internet as part of tuition, but that doesn't mean that you should get full reigns over its use. Your argument is akin to saying that it is a violation of one's consumer rights if the dormitories to do not allow pets despite the fact the individual paid for the usage of the dorms. This really just goes to show how meaningless the term "consumer's rights" is quickly becoming. It's always been a pretty nebulous term, but now it is nebulous and meaningless. The constant misuse of the term will just drive it into mockery and parody. I can understated your personal investment in such a problem, but accusing this practice of violating some nebulous right that may or may not exist is not the way to go out and prove it is a bad policy.

Like I said, if the OP doesn't like it, then he should transfer. If you don't like their policies, then don't give them your business. Or just move off campus.

Do the words "ISP" and "Net Neutrality" mean anything to you? There are laws about what ISPs can and cannot do in regards to throttling traffic, and there are quite literal consumer rights involved. There's no law that says a landlord can't ban pets.

They are not an ISP though, it is a university network that they connect to the internet. They can put whatever restrictions they want on your usage of their network.

Except that with university internet, the university itself almost always is the ISP. They have a direct connection to the internet backbone, they don't farm it out to Comcast.

From personal experience of my halls days my university sold you network access from your room, their network was then connected to the internet by NTL, this means I was paying for and abiding by the rules to access the uni's network not the internet. The uni had the deal with the ISP not me. My uni did ban things such as streaming video and torrents as well as gaming. This was a university of 12,000 all halls were flats of 5 rooms, if each room had one xbox, play station or pc that gives 2400 potential online games at peak times (everyone will play at similar times) that will slow the network even if online gaming only takes little bandwidth. My uni did however allow local servers to be set up as the network was much faster than the internet connection and this was what we had, worked well for multiplayer since as mentioned above you could have 1000 devises or more connected so the popular titles had busy servers.

I'm telling you, man, it is an absolutely piddling amount of data. Look up at the guy who compared his HoN banndwidth usage to what an MP3 or youtube video takes up. We have over 50,000 students on my campus, and even at peak times my download rate never drops below 2.2 megabytes per second, going up over 3 megabytes per second at points where very few people are online. If they really wanted to do something useful with bandwidth, they'd block youtube. Saying online gaming slows down a network is, if anything, less honest than saying that connecting to google slows things down. Next to nothing actually needs to be transferred, like I said above it's mostly cartesian coordinates and statistics -- you know, text, not graphics or sound. Voice chat pushes the bandwidth up some, but even then it's not much; a decent quality .mp3 would take up more bandwidth, to say nothing of a youtube video. And youtube isn't the only streaming site out there; you've got Hulu, Netflix, freakin' CNN.com. All of these are much more intense bandwidth hogs than online gaming, and they probably get more use, to boot.

 

[Redlin5_v1legacy]

If its because of traffic effecting the bandwidth for school related research than yeah, it should be blocked. You can game in your spare time at your place of residence. However, if its not really effecting normal internet use it is kind of sad that the University feels it has to police its students into working.

If you want to blow your exam to play TF2 for eight hours on your laptop using the free internet at school, go hard. It's your money/time you're wasting. If you did it with moderation, good for you but you should have the option if it isn't really effecting the University's bandwidth.

....

[sub][sub][sub]I want to be in University D:[/sub][/sub][/sub]

Edit: Your place of residence is within the school? Well I guess that's the price you pay for having the convenience of being so close to it. That's the way the cookie crumbles.

 

[Stall]

Do the words "ISP" and "Net Neutrality" mean anything to you? There are laws about what ISPs can and cannot do in regards to throttling traffic, and there are quite literal consumer rights involved. There's no law that says a landlord can't ban pets.

And? The university isn't the the ISP here. The ISP isn't banning online games. You are mistaking this for an entirely different issue. The university is providing the service through the ISP. And since the university is responsible for maintaining the network infrastructure on the campus, they are free to regulate and dictate the usage of their network however they please.

This has nothing to do with the ISP dude. You are confounding issues here. It's the university's network. They can do whatever they want for it. The university and an ISP are very, VERY different people.

 

[ecoho]

I have just started university and am so far really enjoying. I currently live in a halls of residence so I'm restricted by the rules they set out and one rule is no online gaming, they monitor the internet and don't allow any online gaming devices to connect. This severly irritates me as I play WoW and have an Xbox and enjoy playing online.

They say they don't allow it because it slows the rest of the place down but I think that's a shit reason as they have industrial broadband which can handle a lot. I pay for a service external to them and am unsure whether this is a violation of my rights as a consumer for them to deny it. However if I am to live here then I need to follow the rules and can't really find anywhere else at the moment.

Do you think this is fair? and also can anyone offer advice on how to get around it, I am not especially skilled at the technical side of computing so any help would be appreciated

first look on campus for a gaming club(most colleges have them) speak with them about your problem and they should help you. If you dont have one organize a petition around the dorms with enough support you can get them to change policy.(speak with the colleges legal department on how to set this up they are there FOR YOU not the college) If that doesnt work go to a bored meeting and present your case and how you are dissatisfied with the way they have handled this and that your not alone. If you follow these steps and your bored of directors arnt complete jack asses they should change their policy.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

Do the words "ISP" and "Net Neutrality" mean anything to you? There are laws about what ISPs can and cannot do in regards to throttling traffic, and there are quite literal consumer rights involved. There's no law that says a landlord can't ban pets.

And? The university isn't the the ISP here. The ISP isn't banning online games. You are mistaking this for an entirely different issue. The university is providing the service through the ISP. And since the university is responsible for maintaining the network infrastructure on the campus, they are free to regulate and dictate the usage of their network however they please.

This has nothing to do with the ISP dude. You are confounding issues here.

Maybe it's different with smaller universities and liberal arts colleges, but at major research universities (like the one I'm attending) the school is its own ISP; it doesn't get internet through a third party (or rather, it gets it through the same third party as any other ISP; whatever branch of government is in charge of that country's connection to the internet backbone.) So if his school is set up like that, the ISP actually is the one banning online games.

 

[cookyy2k]

Even if they have no reasoning or logic behind their decision it's their network and their rules. You could get a mobile dongle and use that or get your own wifi, though they probably wont allow you a landline, but if you're using their network it's abide by their rules.

 

[gamerguyal]

Wow, this is just baffling, not to mention utter bullshit. Your university is treating its students like children who can't manage their time well enough to be able to play games online and still do homework. That's the only reason I can think of for doing this, unless they have an internet connection that's severely lacking compared to any other respectable university. To put things in perspective, at my school I get 30Mbps down and 5Mbps up DURING TIMES OF VERY HIGH TRAFFIC. And that's with the connection speeds capped, I know a guy on my floor who asked our IT department to uncap his connection and he was getting upwards of 80Mbps down and I once watched him get a 1 ms ping.

TL;DR Your university should be capable of handling online gaming, they're just refusing to do so.

 

[Atheist.]

Buy a smartphone with fast internet. Tether it, or make your phone into a wireless modem. Problem solved. I've been using my smartphone for online gaming for two years now, and it works just fine. Except when it's storming, of course.