download speeds on college campus

[freeyourboxers]

I am currently attending college and living off campus. When using one of the public machines, download speeds are well over 100k/sec. In my room, they are about 4k/sec. This is obviously unacceptable :-) I'm guessing that the school somehow (please explain if you know) restricts the bandwidth that the residence connections are allowed. I can understand why they would want to do this, as they would quickly hit some bottle necks if they didn't. However, I don't want to have to deal with it, and the way I see it, as long as I don't tell anyone else how to get around it (none of my friends really have computers anyway), they wont even notice the missing bandwidth. So if anyone has any ideas, I'd love to hear them. My (barely) educated guess is that it has something to do with ports. But then again, I don't really understand what ports do exactly, so if anyone wants to throw in that information too, I'd be much obliged. Thank you much in advance. Everyone have a great night

--Matt

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Dual 450 G4, 320megs RAM, Jaguar

[davidbrit2]

You entire residence building is likely on one switched segment. This means that all the crosstalk from the file sharing applications will bog things down quite a bit. My solution would be to go door to door and beat the piss out of everyone that's running Kazaa. ;-)

[Rhino_G3]

Yep, that's what happened here at my school until they started blocking ports/protocols. Now only the knowlegable know how to get around it with proxies or port forwarding... unfortunately you have to have a broadband access point somewhere else outside of the dorm network.