Redbricks Intranet Collective (RIC)

Internet access is now very slow at night so we're moving to a different provider to speed things up.

The amount of Internet being consumed by people on the estate has been steadily increasing for the past few months. As a result the connection speed has become very slow every evening. We've had a number of new people connecting but it's possibly the increasing use of the BBC's iplayer that is to blame, though we haven't analysed the usage to know exactly. (The BBC's iplayer is causing all UK Internet service providers to re-think the way they provide Internet access because it's consuming so much bandwidth.)
Occasionally people do use aggressive peer2peer software and slow the Internet access down for everyone considerably. We also regularly check if people download more than their monthly allowance. In both cases, now that we have contact details for most people we're able to ring them and ask them to stop and they're always gracious and agreeable.

For more than the past year our Internet Service Provider, The Phone Co-op, has restricted our Internet connection speed to 1Mb/s, down from the 6.5Mb/s we should expect, because of the huge amount we collectively have been downloading.

In hopefully a week's time we will move to Zen Internet instead of the Phone Co-op, who are OK with the amount we download and won't have the 1Mb/s restriction. Thus the speed of Internet access should dramatically increase.

Additionally the Internet access point will move from Humberstone Ave to Redbricks Ave, finally giving the people of Rockdove a break from the multiple points of potential failure resulting from them being furthest away from the Internet connection point. Correspondingly we'll be continuing our focus on improving infrastructure across the estate so that problems with equipment are reduced anyway (not that we have many problems these days).