Too Many Tunes

Free music downloading software and related programs have network managers at colleges across the nation singing the blues. The innovative software, with names such as MP3 and Napster, allows anyone with a computer and an Internet connection to transform a hard drive into the mother of all jukeboxes. The bad news is that Dartmouth's hard-core music lovers can turn the College's on-ramp to the information highway into a virtual traffic jam.

"We've occasionally seen one student accounting for 50 percent or more of the total Internet traffic on the Dartmouth network," says computing services spokesman Bill Brawley. Brawley notifies offenders of their transgressions, and so far they all have responded to the shoulder tap. Other schools are less subtle. In February the University of Chicago, Indiana Univeristy, Northwestern University and American University, among others, blocked student access to Napster.com, a popular MP3-sharing site, because their networks were overloaded. Dartmouth, by contrast, will handle the traffic problem by offering an even faster Internet connection18 MBPS (that's 18 million bits per second) starting this spring.