Clemson Reverses Policy; Internet Long Distance OK

Krimsen writes "Looks like Clemson Universty felt the pressure from angry students being denied free long distance. They are allowing access to dialpad.com."

Comments

Some facts about Clemson

[Mr. Penguin]

Sorry that I didn't get in on the first article that this topic covered, but I would like to say a few things about Clemson that you may or may not know.

I was once a student at Clemson University, and during that time, I edited one of the campus newspapers (the independent one). Of course, I had my own run-ins with DCIT, and from that I learned a great deal about the way that their organization works.

First of all, there's no problem with Clemson's bandwidth. Just a few months ago, I could sit in my office in the early evening (5p.m. EST) and download .iso images at around an average of 200k per second, topping out at 400k per second. Much better than I get at my current job, where our bandwidth comes from a pair of T-1s. I don't know what Clemson has now, but it does provide massive bandwidth. I was in front of the firewall, but I know for a fact that dorm access isn't much slower.

Secondly, Clemson has a contract with WorldCom (formerly MCI) for all of their telecommunications (which I believe includes their bandwidth). If you ask me, them banning dialpad.com (a competitor of MCI) is akin to monopilistic practices.

Thirdly, as some people mentioned, textbooks are sold on campus. However, the University does not directly profit from their sales. Barnes & Noble rents space in their student union and handles all transactions.

These are just a few of the things that I have retained and thought that I would pass along. I do agree that it was quite awful for them to ban any Internet site, especially when they can only benefit from doing so. Chris Duckenfield has been a thorn in my side for a long while. If you pay attention, you'll see him screw up again sooner or later.



Brad Johnson
--We are the Music Makers, and we
are the Dreamers of Dreams

Re:Napster, Dialpad, what next?

[arivanov]

This is a result of system administrator stupidity multiplied by their ignorance. This may sound like an obvious flaimebait considering the quantity of software development in some Universities, but that is the way things actually are. Even if there is a development going on in an university those are usually not the people who administer the networks and define policies. They used to be, but they are no longer there.

The reason for this is very simple. Everything is driven by cost. But not by cost as should (as in economics laws) but by the laws of reverse economics operating in modern academia.

Namely:

staff costs are set by almost all sponsors to be a fixed percentage or have a limited percent from overall spending. So as a result academia buys the biggest boxes they can buy to afford staff. And noone gives a fsck about developing anything because development actually drops costs and requires higher personnel expenses instead of new iron.

I have heard that this trend is becoming popular in the US as well so if I am not correct please correct me, but in EU this is exactlly the way things are going. Tempus and Copernicus projects all operate on a fixed percentage principle for iron and staff.

As a result of this academic projects or government projects that deal with efficient networking and efficient machine usage never get implemented in the "computing part" of the academia. The "computing part" of the academia is not interested. No food. They are implemented in physics, chemistry, biology, etc where the computing is a secondary expense.

There are numerous examples to this but there is no point quoting them so I will restrict myself to the a appropriate technology for VOIP, napster, streaming media, etc. This is QOS over IP, either as RED or as Class Based Queing. They have been initially developed as an US government project. Further development has circulated around various universities...

If this technology was used, the situation would be as follows:

Who cares about napster, put a limit of 33.6K for the entire university on it burstable to full bandwidth. As a result as bandwidth becomes precious and important it will be forced to accomodate itself in the 33.6. Otherwise it will use only what is available to it.

Same stands for the free VOIP services, etc.

The only problem here is that the system administrators will have to use FreeBSD (or Linux 2.2.+) as means to controll the bandwidth. And they do not want this because this means:

1. They will have to learn
2. They will not be able to justify the "buy the next big routing iron (usually blue)" project.

Written by an ex-academia sysadmin...

'Free' phone service

[mccrohan]

I know this is going to seem like blasphemy to some people, but let's think a little bit about 'free' phone service...or, for that matter, 'free' anything. We all know bandwidth is never free - SOMEONE is paying for it, and if it's not you, then the person who IS paying for it is probably looking for a way to bill you for it. Dialpad and other internet telephony makes itself cheap by reducing the amount of bandwidth it uses (by sampling down the conversation to the point where it's almost unintelligible) and by using bandwidth most of us don't get billed for on a by-volume basis. Was Clemson wrong to ban it? Maybe. I don't have any evidence that it was really causing them bandwidth problems. But their most likely next move will be to raise student fees to cover the additional bandwidth expense. Then every student on campus will be subsidizing the long distance habit of the folks who want to call home every night. In this case, the cost may be minor. But the next time this debate comes around, for some other service, it might not be. Think about it. Free isn't always free.

Result: Free publicity for Internet long distance

[crow]

So the net result of this is good: Clemson backed down on Internet censoring, and in the process gave free publicity to the free long distance services. I'll be that many students who had never considered bypassing the traditional phone system are now exploring their options.

Colleges provide Education. They are *not* ISPs.

[Jeff Mahoney]

As a System Admin for a major technical university, we've been grappling with this on a daily basis.

I'm a strong proponent of maintaining a completely open network in an academic environment. Obviously key administrative resources, like database servers, need to be restricted access - but you get the idea.

One thing many people never mention is that Colleges and Universities are NOT ISPs. The primary goal of institutes of higher learning is education. While I'll be the first to shout from the towers that the Internet is a great educational resource, parts of it are not.

Do sites like Napster foster educational value? It's debatable, but I'd lean towards ``no.''

High bandwidth connections are NOT free. They're not even close to being cheap, either. A T3 connection for a commercial enterprise is a few hundred thousand dollars per year. Educational institutes usually get a substantial discount on Internet services. However, a T3 is still over $100,000/year.

Your educational resources (buildings, classrooms, facilities, etc) and your internet connection funding come from the same pool of cash. Since the primary purpose of an educational institute is - education - the appropriate use of funds is clearly on resources.

When the pipe fills up, do you just get a bigger pipe? No. Any sane network administrator on the planet will tell you that when the network starts to become overutilized - you figure out why it's overutilized before you buy a bigger pipe.

Is something like Napster a good use of the available bandwidth? Faced with that question, and the knowledge of limited funding - my answer is no.

While I realize that the topic on hand is the dialpad/Clemson case (which I do think is a valid use of network resources) - I've noticed in the past that people throw up their arms in protest without keeping the simple fact that they're not an ISP in mind.

-Jeff

Re:Colleges provide Education. They are *not* ISPs

[Thomas Charron]

So, essentially, colleges should pay network administrators to keep up with every non productive, bandwidth sucking application, and how to monitor/limit the bandwidth utilized by these applications?

Colleges are *NOT* ISP's, and do *NOT* provide network connections as a *right*. The students do not own the network. The school does, and they can do pretty much whatever the heck they want to with it. That includes disallowing certain traffic..

Now, personally, I'd bandwidth throttle the guys using g/napster, allowing them to continue using such a system, but at a price that doesn't impeed others who are using it for more legit means..

Re:Colleges provide Education. They are *not* ISPs

[Thomas Charron]

As an idea, why not simply identify the high bandwidth abusers, and simply throttle their bandwidth? This would not use nearly as much managment time, and would address the problem on a more local level.

Heck, if you did some sort of measurments of the average usage, etc, you could script a system that could bandwidth limit things at different times of the day, etc..