The consequences of the high-tech-developments can be guessed: the speed is used, used very well. Campus residents exchange music tracks, programmes and complete films on a large scale. The campusnet is also very well suited to playing games. And, of course, it is much more fun to play a fellow human being than to play a computer, especially if you can shoot your flatmates to pieces virtually.
Campusnet is used intensively. Network-manager SNT (Student Network Twente) maintains online statistics of the traffic. On average about a fifth of the bandwidth is in use. On average, that means that during the day and evening it is even busier on the network. At night it is somewhat quieter. SNT did set a limit. Students may produce 50 GB in traffic per week. That means that each week you can easily download fifteen complete films and pass them on. SNT does not adhere too strictly to this limit: occasionally producing twice the traffic is not a problem.
Not only internally but also externally there is a lot of traffic. The UT is the largest user of Surfnet, the Dutch network connecting universities and research centres, and a large part of the UT-usage comes from Campusnet. At this moment the UT is connected to the outside world via a gigabit-line, but this so-called Gigaport-project already foresees a growth to approximately twenty gigabit by the end of next year. 'The infrastructure has to be ahead of the developments'. CIV-employee Gert Meierink explains. 'In future we want to be able to offer high quality video-connections, this takes a lot of bandwidth.' The intention is for the TeleTOP-project at the UT to be using that. However, to make that possible the connections between the faculties have to upgraded.
As said before much, if not 'everything', can be found on Campusnet. You could say that many students have opened part of their hard drive to other users. From these so-called shares the newest films and CDs can be downloaded, usually of good quality. Films have sometimes been on Campusnet for weeks before they are played in the cinemas of Enschede. Flat residents can easily find the films using the search engine Dance, after which the film can be copied to their own computer in minutes, watched and then deleted. Dance has the same purpose for the campus as Napster has for the people who exchange music internationally.
The Dutch copyright organisation BUMA has filed a complaint against this practice with the UT recently. 'But', according to Meierink, 'we will not yet close down Dance. There is not enough jurisprudence about it as yet.'
