Internet situation at most schools.

College Life
1

I am a junior in HS right now. Decent grades, good financial base thanks to the Tuition Exchange program + family business to be sold to cover cost, and am beginning to look really deeply into schools. While my main concerns are related to academics, and finding schools with good support for my… wide array of interests while still being small enough to have a decent average class size. I am, however, the definition of a data hog. I create youtube videos, run a small website, freelance animate and edit video, and consume massive amounts of internet content on a daily basis. I also play way more videogames than I should, even participating in a few esports (Primarily tf2).

While I understand that my connected lifestyle will take a hit when entering college, I do wish to continue some of these activities, so my question is this; I have heard horror stories of campus internet, ports for voip/ games/ steam/ ftp being blocked, to ~10kbps download speeds, excessive throttling, packet loss, that sort of thing. HOWEVER, most of these stories tend to be around 2009 era or before, so can anyone tell me what the state of in dorm internet is at your school.
I especially would like input from those at RIT (currently my top pick), or any of the other schools on the list below

Carnegie Mellon
RPI
MIT
Case Western
IUPUI (Indianapolis)
Northeastern

Im mostly looking for schools strong in compsci and business, preferably in the east or midwest. Thanks for your help

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Universities have generally been leaders in internet - they were some of the first places to be wired. I haven’t really heard many horror stories about internet, and if you’re looking at schools with strong CS, they’ll likely have good internet. I’m at Northeastern (since you mentioned that), and wired internet on campus is now gigabit. I’ve also had no problems with any of the possible issues you mention. Except for that one time when someone DDOSed the university network any slowed things down for a bit, but that’s hardly the norm!

3

RPI and Case Western are incredibly wired. There are 50% more ethernet ports than students at RPI. Both have very fast internet (I believe Case is gigabit, not sure about RPI. Probably is, with their emphasis on computer networks). CMU and MIT are just as nice. CMU and MIT have 24-hour computer labs, and RPI has 1 (all students are required to have laptops at RPI, as well). So the networks will definitely be great.

Frankly, going to college will probably be cheaper than paying comcast for gigabit ethernet :slight_smile: