To: Joanne Hugi, Computing Center Director

From: Greg Bothun, Chair, Ed. Tech. Committee

Re: Modem Policy

The Educational Technology Committee has carefully considered different management strategies for the campus modem pool. The goal is to work out an equitable policy that provides the students with reasonable access and levels of service. The committee fully realizes the limitations placed on any policy recommendation by the current 60:1 ratio of modems to users and that no one policy will please everyone (or even anyone). The current policy of two hours on all modem lines, however, is viewed to be too restrictive as it offers only one level of service and the needs of the modem community vary widely. Under this policy, certain levels of service and legitimate use of the modem resource are not being accomodated. The committee's internal discussions, together with some external advice, have lead to the following possibilities, one of which we have chosen as our initial recommendation for revising the current modem policy:

• The initiation of a cap on cumulative modem time per month per student. This is done at other Universities but we do not recommend its implementation here (yet).
• Seperate modem numbers for faculty and students. We do not recommend this either due to 1) increased adminstrative burden associated with authentication and 2) student subsidy of faculty lines as faculty have not (yet) been charged for the installation of new modems.
• Variable auto logout times depending upon time of day. While this ultimately may evolve to be the modem policy, we do not recommend its initiation yet. Instead we propose that modem usage data be evaluated at the end of fall term to see if some optimal scheme can be developed.
• A two tier modem system involving an express modem pool with some timelimit and a longer timelimit modem pool. It is this option that the committee forwards to you as its recommendation.

The details of the two tier modem system were discussed by the committee with no clear concensus on what the time limits should be although most favor an express time limit of 1--2 hours and an extended time limit of 6--8 hours. Since many users are now accustomed to the 2 hour time limit, it is simplest to let that remain intact for now. Futhermore, there was general agreement that the majority of the modem pool be placed in the express category. This leads to the following specific recommendation:

• 2/3 of the modem pool should be in the express modem category with a time limit of 2 hours. Preferably, these modems should all be on one phone number.
• The remaining 1/3 should be in the longer term category with a time limit of 6 hours.

While we realize there may be some technical obstacles to this 2/3;1/3 implementation, we hope that you will forward this recommendation to your staff for internal discussion to see if its feasible to implement the suggested policy. Please provide feedback to the Ed. Tech committee on your progress and the result of these internal discussions bearing in mind that our goal here is to provide some range of service to the students whose dollars we are spending.

Thank you for our consideration.