The first thing I noticed at Bond, and which continues to confuse me to this day, is the extremely low speed ( and quality - but that is a discussion for another day ) given to each user on campus. Wherever you log onto the network, your connection speed is limited to 1 Mbit/s, which is far below the 20 I am used to back home. The connection is also rather unstable, so you are lucky if you get much more than about 70-80% of that. This makes all downloads a real pain, as even leaving the computer online over the night is not enough.. Several days are often required, depending on what you download ( only legal material of course……. )

Today, I believe I have found away around this problem, provided you have multiple computers available to you. This solution allows to multiply your speed by the number of computers you have, provided you have enough Bond logins for half of them ( i.e. if you have four computers, you will need two logins as each user is only allowed to log in twice ).

The solution is based on the fact that the internal network provides speeds exceeding that of the internet speed, and that most torrent software will attempt to connect to peers as close to you as possible. All you have to do is start up the same torrent on all you computers, and leave it running. The clients will all share what they download between them near instantaneously through the local connection, and at the same time, they will all download from the internet with the regular speed the packets that they cannot get locally, effectively splitting the download. Since each login receives its own speed limit, you are not bound by a single 1 Mbit/s limit, but rather x Mbit/s where x is the number of computers. Quite a substantial increase.. When using three computers, you will decrease the download time by a threefold!

My two cents on downloading for now