University Halls - tests show internet speed differences

Buried a little deep in the student newspaper out this week is an article unattributed on broadband tests that students have been running in various private and university Halls. There is a facebook page the students have set up. Its been inspired by a national television appeal for ISPs to be honest about the internet speeds they provide. So after a week long test the results are published. Perhaps its too easy to pick at the unscientific nature of the analysis or the fact that some of the results do not seem feasible. Anyway, for the University's part, we are concerned about the specific mention of taking 3 hours to download a lecture off blackboard. So we followed that up and have found that indeed there are some lecturers who have loaded material up into Blackboard that are so "large" that they really will take 3 hours to download........there are other solutions to that specific problem which we are now followingup with the lecturers concerned. For the record, all of the University supported resnet Halls in Bradford are supplied with just over 1 Meg download and 0.5 Meg upload with an enviable contention of 10:1 (most ISPs run at much higher contention levels). We also put no limit on data transfer in a month. There have been no significant reports since the start of the new Session through our service desk (available 24x7x365) of either service interruptions, service response issues or performance problems. We have dealt with one or two specifics and also of course the somewhat routine "banning" of accounts due to undesirable network traffic through virus, trojan or some other effect. We may be able to do something about that more proactively and are looking at implementing a solution to improve that situation.