I've taught online for six years using both Blackboard and Desire2Learn products. Aside from obvious download problems that students may encounter if they aren't using broadband connections, I have found that both platforms will kick students out of exams or quizzes more frequently if they don't use broadband. I think it's really the nature of dial-up: student encounters a "tough" question and doesn't click anything for a while, the dial-up times out, and the exam ends up needing a reset. The problem was more prevalent before broadband became easily available in small towns and rural areas. Regarding campus broadband issues, the college where I retired had ongoing problems on its residential campus. Students attending traditional classes would fire up their favorite P2P file sharing program on the PC in their dorm room, set up a couple of movies to download, and go to class. Meanwhile, everything else on campus slowed to a crawl. The technies put installed some sort of bandwidth allocation filters, and things got better. (At one point, they were simply taking the dorms offline during certain hours!)

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