STAFF EDIT: Paying for internet reasonable

Along with the $310 to $630 extra students will be paying for on-campus housing next year, Boston University will begin charging $100 for internet use. Although most students will immediately react with outrage, providing the option not to pay for service is considerate. However, BU could have handled the situation much better and should have weighed other options to deal with rising costs.

Internet access has become an integral part of housing for college students, with many professors using e-mail and websites to communicate important course information. Few students are likely to waive the fee, especially since it will automatically be added to tuition bills like the sports pass and medical insurance. However, giving the tiny number of students who do not own computers or prefer to use modems or other campus computer facilities the option to save $100 is still an equitable option.

BU does probably need the fee to offset rising costs and likely will not actually profit from providing ethernet. File-sharing has dramatically increased bandwidth use, but Information Technology has done an excellent job of responding to this and other problems. All dorms now have ethernet, and IT keeps internet available almost all the time. Although students have essentially been paying for internet service all along (just under a different category on their bills), BU must recognize that students will feel they are paying more once it is itemized. Students will demand the high quality of service that comes with increased cost, and IT cannot slip up.

Because schools brag about how wired they are to woo students, and they have come to expect high-speed internet in all dorms, this will shock students. Announcing the fee now was a serious public relations blunder by BU. Had the university simply hiked housing fees an extra $100 or just announced the fee at the same time as next year’s housing rates, students would have understood the situation much better. But yesterday’s letters seemed to come out of nowhere, and students are already committed to living on campus.

Students’ perception of the change is far worse than the actual situation. Paying about $10 a month for internet will not break the bank for most students, and they would have ended up paying for the increased usage in some form anyway. However, a more pleasing and fair option would have considered limiting how much bandwidth each student can use or charging those who use massive amounts of it, similar to methods used by other schools like Penn State. Students who download more movies than they can actually watch or run Half-Life servers in Warren Towers will rightly pay more than those who use their computers for more academic purposes. Instead of spreading the cost of maintaining bandwidth around, BU should go after the students who abuse it most. All students need to get course documents, but a luxury tax would help screen out the scholarly from the bandwidth hogs.