Very odd network problem

I'm going to see our Mac specialist here at college tomorrow, but I figured I'd post this just to see if anyone had any ideas.

We have a college network here, that runs very well usually. Very fast loading speeds, etc. Lately, my speeds have been quite low - iStat pro was giving me speeds around 35-50 KB/s. This occurs both on the wireless and wired connections.

I'm also having some bizarre wired problems. We have email provided to us, and for some reason, when on the wired, I can't get to the email. If I try to go through my browser to the webmail, I get a -12263 error. I also have Entourage, which won't sync and gives me a "End of file reached" error when I try to send an email. All of this works fine over the wireless, but is a bit slow (I assume due to my slowed-down connection).

Does anyone have any ideas as to what in the world might be happening? I realize network issues are often complex and very specific, so this might not be the right place to take the issue (as I said, I'm going to see our specialist tomorrow), but any advice would be greatly appreciated.

 

what college

 

Sorry...why does that matter? I don't mean to be uncooperative or something, but I'd prefer to not give out information like that on an open forum on the internet. Does it matter which college I'm at?

 

Are you certain it is just you that's getting the slow speeds? How long has this issue been going on for?

 

does your campus offer the wireless connection? or are you wirelessly connected to your personal router, which in turn is connected to ethernet?

I remember when my campus offered wireless, and it was so crappy I couldn't stand it. I had to give up playing Everquest because 3+ seconds of lag was getting me killed. On another note, our campus blamed the speed on a poor trunk connection, causing a bottleneck. Things did get better just before I graduated

 

It's been an issue for about a week, and I'm pretty sure it's just me. I work in our ResNet department, so I figured I would've heard from other students if they were having problems (most don't try to troubleshoot, they just come to us). And it is the college's Wi-Fi, it normally works pretty well (better than it is now, though it is slower than wired).

I'm about to go to our Mac guy, so we'll see what he says.

 

For those wondering, the problem was that our network filter for iPhones was catching MAC addresses from some Macs as well.

 

really..."catching"... so it was recognizing your computer as an iphone and throttling back the speed of your connection?

 

Not quite - it was reading it as an iPhone and therefore bypassing our network login utilities, so I couldn't access anything related to being in the network (campus email, etc). The bandwidth issues are just systemic - must have a lot of file sharers this semester or something.