"What we're seeing in the past year or so is a proliferation of mobile devices. Everyone's showing up with a smartphone, a tablet, a laptop and some people even bring desktops," he says. "Over the past year, we tracked all our devices - we require students to register every device - and we've seen a ratio of more than 2:1 in devices per student."

As a consequence, UMass - Dartmouth adopted an Exinda traffic shaping appliance to help ensure uptime and availability for both student entertainment and academic purposes. The previous tool, which used complicated command line interfaces instead of GUIs, was proving ineffective, and had even caused some network problems itself.

The Exinda 8760, which Pacheco says simply acts as a filter and traffic shaper sitting between the network and the Internet, handles 2.5Gbps of throughput and retails for $82,900.

One improvement the school has made, says Pacheco, is that the dorm network can be heavily prioritized at night, while the academic buildings receive the lion's share of the bandwidth during the day.

Additionally, every dorm IP address is capped at 3Mbps, to ensure that a few heavy users don't impinge on the user experience for everyone else.