A recent ECAR report cites a tragedy of the commons playing out in the ether of university wireless networks. It seems that the number of “Internet capable devices” is increasing at a steep rate among campus humanoids, most sharply among students. In fact, the prediction is that there will be four devices per student on DR campuses by 2014. At TAMU, that translates into more than 200,000 devices, and that doesn’t even account for faculty, staff, administrators and visitors. What’s frightening is that the curve doesn’t appear to be slowing. While we have yet to see saturation of the campus network, the theory of the tragedy of the commons would posit that this condition will eventually lead to a depletion of the common resource (e.g., bandwidth, network nodes, addresses, etc.).
How will individual digital behavior and habits impact the collective commons of shared networking space? As millions are spent, are there other areas of our IT infrastructure that have received short shrift? Will the current adequacy of the resource eventually move to scarcity? Personally, I’m not sure. We seem to be keeping up with things, but barely. If the trend of (roughly) doubling devices every three years continues, we may not be able to keep up in the future.
