Dr Ashutosh Mishra called me to his cabin today, and talked for about an hour about the current condition of the internet. There was statistical backing for everything he said - he showed me stats on Ironport as evidence, and at that point I had to believe him. Anyway, here goes the core of what he said.
Mainly he told me three points :
1) Our institute has received legal notice from Paramount Pictures that we're streaming some of their new movies via Torrent. Due to this, they were forced to block Torrent. What makes the situation bad is that externally we have only a single IP. As a result, if 100 students download a movie, to someone outside the institute it seems as if the same movie has been downloaded 100 times from the same IP. Similar is the reason why our institute's IP has been blacklisted by many sites.
2) Probably the most important point. Right after the torrents were blocked, some of the students started flooding packets in the proxy. He even showed me the details of such packets - they were having no destination IP. This means that some students were deliberately trying to bring down IIITA internet by overloading the server, much like DDoS. This makes the response time of the server go up considerably, and also makes it drop even legitimate packets (which might be why our downloads break in between, I don't know). As per the statistics shown by him, the top 10 IPs from which such requests were sent are belonging to BH4, BH3 and GH. Some of these details have been sent to us in yesterday's mail - the 'localhost' packets are related to this. HE SAID THAT IF THIS CONTINUES TO BE THE CASE, HE MIGHT EVEN UNPLUG THE INTERNET TO THE BOYS AND GIRLS HOSTELS.
3) Internet usage by students is far too high. As per the statistics shown by him, there were students who used ~100gb in a period of two weeks. He is tracking such students (from the login id) and suspending their internet access. Also, only as low as 55% of the internet usage is going through the proxies - rest 45% is going through VPNs. If onion tunneling technology such as Tor are used, our IP will be held responsible for what is done by other people (outside) using it - that's how onion routing works. Apart from this, another interesting point he told was that some students are sharing login credentials with people outside our college in return for cigarettes etc.
About what's going to happen next - If the packet flooding does not stop, we might go into a period of internet blackout. Also, torrents aren't going to be enabled anytime soon due to the legal issues.
In short, the current pathetic condition of our internet is caused by some of us. Only we can fix it as well.