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Clemson Reverses Policy; Internet Long Distance OK

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the seeing-the-light dept.

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

1 of 105 comments (clear)

  1. Colleges provide Education. They are *not* ISPs. by Jeff+Mahoney · · Score: 5
    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