Lakeland is doubling its bandwidth today, Nov. 9. The pipe controlling Lakeland’s Internet traffic is being upgraded from about 50 mega bits per second (mbit/s) to 100 mbit/s.

“As of right now with a 50 [mbit/s pipeline] we’re hitting our max during the evening and a couple times during the night,” said Director of IT Operations Larry Marcus. “The way that we shape now is a little bit different. We take what we refer to as critical traffic, normal traffic, and low traffic, and then we carve out specific percentages of the whole.”

This was done recently to help alleviate bandwidth cap issues, but, according to Marcus, from now on the college should just be able to keep increasing its amount of bandwidth. He hopes to be able to double LC’s bandwidth again as soon as a couple years from now.

One of the biggest consumers of Internet traffic is multimedia—YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, and others. According to an article by Chikodi Chima titled “Report: Netflix hogs 32 percent of peak Internet bandwidth,” Netflix, HTTP, YouTube, and BitTorrent rounded out the top services of Internet traffic and accounted for 64.4 percent in North America.

Because of this, multimedia streaming is given low priority in residence halls and normal priority in classrooms. Internet speeds will vary depending on the time of day one is using an Internet connection and the type of traffic.

For some, anything more than an instant can feel like too long of a period to wait for one’s Facebook page to load. But Lakeland students can rest a little easier next week knowing they can waste less time waiting for their social media sites to load, and have more time to study for classes.

Time Warner will remain as LC’s Internet service provider. Previously, Time Warner installed a fiber optic cable that is capable of delivering up to 1 giga bits/s, but budget limits the utilization of the pipeline’s full capabilities.