Indiana University students have regained access to Napster this weekend, but Northwestern administrators said they are taking a “wait-and-see” attitude toward making the controversial mp3 server available to students.
Indiana is conducting a two-week trial to determine whether control measures implemented by the university and Napster Inc. will sufficiently reduce the amount of bandwidth the program uses to allow access permanently, said Mark Bruhn, Indiana’s information technology policy officer.
At Indiana, officials have set up a system that prioritizes Internet use, so e-mail and World Wide Web users have quicker response times than Napster users.
Meanwhile, Napster officials have incorporated use of Internet 2 into their system, hoping to make their software appealing to major research universities that have access to the next-generation Internet. Many of those universities, including NU, blocked access to Napster after excessive use clogged traffic to the Internet, slowing connections for many students.
In December, NU prevented students from using the server, which is popular among college students who exchange music over the Internet. Officials said Napster used as much as 30 percent of NU’s bandwidth.
Administrators do not plan to change NU’s policy soon.
“We are taking a look at what Indiana is doing, but at this point we don’t have any plans to change what we are doing immediately,” said Al Cubbage, NU’s vice president for university relations.
Roger Safian, NU’s information security coordinator, said he was interested in the results of the trial.
“It would be nice if Indiana’s experiment works,” Safian said.
Bruhn said Napster and Indiana were in contact to find a solution to the bandwidth problems shortly after the university announced the ban.
“Our network administrators contacted them — we wanted to know how (Napster) worked,” Bruhn said. “It turned out that they were interested in our network. We independently came up with the same idea.”
The two organizations will jointly publish their potential solution as an Internet Draft, or networking proposal, on April 11.
Napster spokesman Dan Wool said their fix has already been partially implemented in the current version of the program, which begins all searches with Internet 2 and then moves to the slower and more populated public Internet. He said several of the bandwidth problems caused by Napster could be found at the gateways between universities’ Internet systems and the mainstream Internet.
A more updated version of Napster will be released shortly, he said.
Beyond the changes to Napster, Bruhn said Indiana has installed a new network management system which gives priority to services like e-mail and the Web and reduces the priority of “recreational” software such as Napster. This would slow the response time for Napster users.
But Bruhn added that it was too early to evaluate the success of Indiana’s experiment.
