Several area colleges are considering charging students separately for campus ethernet services, though they still include the charge in students’ room and board costs, Boston College, Harvard University and Northeastern University officials said last week.

Boston University officials last Tuesday announced the school will begin charging students a separate $100 fee for the service next year. The letter notifying the students of the new charge said the fee will be added because of ‘vast improvement in the speed and overall capability of … personal computers and software.’

The letter also said the additional fee is something ‘many other institutions have done.’

Harvard, BC and Northeastern spokesmen said yesterday all ethernet charges, at this point, are included in room and board charges. However, all three school officials alluded to the idea that this service may not always be included as part of their board charges, saying they had considered the change.

Other schools have begun charging students for ethernet use in different ways, some based on actual usage, rather than by a flat fee as BU announced it will do next year.

Because students nationwide have increased their internet use at a rapid rate in recent years, Pennsylvania State University spokesman Cliff Rodack said many schools, including Penn State, have been forced to purchase more broadband width for student use. Penn State last year developed a ‘unique program to deal with broadband access,’ Rodack said.

The program, called ‘ResCom’ and developed by a committee of students, administrators and personnel from the school’s telecommunications networking services, requires students to pay roughly $50 a year for access to broadband and ResNet.

Rodack said students are allowed 1.5 gigabytes of uploaded material and 1.5 gigabytes of downloaded material per week. Students receive a written warning if they surpass the limit, Rodack said, and after two offenses, students’ uploading and downloading capabilities are limited to 56 kilobytes for the remainder of the semester. After a third offense, students’ uploading and downloading capabilities are cut off entirely, he said.

Rodack said costs of developing the more complex program were minimal. But he said he believes it was worth it for the university to invest money in the program because it helps create incentives for students to use less broadband capacity.

‘It’s a one-time fee,’ Rodack said. ‘It prevents the costs associated with constantly having to purchase more broadband.’

The software that was developed has the unique capability to identify the source of the bandwidth use and then limit uploads and downloads from that source.

The program has been very successful for the university, Rodack said 90 percent of its users have never been warned for overuse of the internet, and only 3 percent have been cut off from internet use entirely.

Cornell University has also recently launched a unique program to combat high internet costs at their university, according to Information Technology Architecture and Strategic Vendor Relations director David Vernon.

Cornell and numerous other universities across the country have begun to tap wireless technology for their networks for what Vernon called a ‘mobile laptop generation.’

Cornell also began initiated a program this year where students pay for the amount of bandwidth they use, Vernon said.

All students are required to purchase a port if they plan to use the internet, and then charged $4 per month for an allotted two gigabytes of uploading and downloading capability each. Once students surpass this allotted amount, they are charged one-third of a cent for every megabyte used thereafter.

According to Vernon, only 10 to 15 percent of students have ever exceeded the four-gigabyte cap.

‘The program has been very successful,’ Vernon said. ‘Students are not limited in the amount of bytes they use, however, this program does prevent those who are data intensive from abusing the system. The program has caused behavior adjustment in these people.’

Both Rodack and Vernon agreed that the key to their program has been education.

‘The problem with abuse lies in those who do not even realize when they are using bytes,’ Rodack said.

Rodack cited programs such as KaZaa and Morpheus for being responsible for this problem.

‘Students don’t realize that even when they are not using their computer uploading is taking place, this often is what uses most of their bytes and broadband width,’ he said.