Severe Campus Connection Problem

[ZeeJustin]

I'm living in a dorm at UMD, and my bad connection has cost me a ridiculous amount of money in EV.

Sometimes the connection completely goes down, but that's rare, and that's not what I'm concerned about.

What I am concerned about is that when I'm still connected to the internet, I won't be able to connect to various poker sites. For a while I couldn't play on any poker site but UB w/out major problems. Pokerstars has always been the worst.
The overall internet connection will be great. I can chat on aim, post on 2+2, and download porn at amazing speeds, but I won't be able to connect to party. I'll even be chatting on aim w/ people that are connected to party just fine, so it's not an issue w/ the poker sites.

Some people have said this is a bandwidth problem caused by college kids and typical college kid downloads. We have this program called DC++ which has a file transfer server only accessible by people w/ the same UMD T3 internet connection. It's amazing how fast downloads are with this program. This theory makes no sense to me though. Why would that cause an issue w/ poker sites only?

Other people have told me this is a port issue, and that packets are being filtered from my network people, but I don't even know what that means really.

Has anyone had experience with this before?

This problem has become ridiculously expensive, and I'm willing to pay for a new connection to get this fixed. What are my best options? I'm under the impression that there are now decent high speed wireless connections that work anywhere in the country. Anyone have any details on that?

-thanks in advance
-Justin Bonomo