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Cornell Implementing Bandwidth Charges
Sabalon writes "Cornell University is planning on implementing a plan where if faculty, staff or students use more than 2GB of bandwidth a month, they will be charged for the additional bandwidth usage. The article mentions that last year over 100,000GB worth of files were sent from Cornell's network. I'm sure this is not the only school doing this or moving to this. I'm sure the conspiracy theory people will see this as a suggestion by Microsoft to stop students from getting those pesky Linux iso images. At least, according to the RIAA, CD sales around Cornell should now skyrocket :)" It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. Since students often have accounts on several different university machines, I suspect the more rebellious ones will be running an assortment of proxies and redirections to get around the restrictions.
I agree that this is absolutely necessary, as I pay the bandwidth bills at my company and know what it's like, but they have to be careful not to stifle innovation, as the security features they will now need become more and more complicated.
What will this do to the thousands of students that use 802.11b at the library and other campus buildings? Will the charges be based on MAC address? Since MAC addresses are so easy to spoof, authentication will become necessary. How can that be done easily across multiple platforms?
The new measures might wind up costing them more than they expected. How about limiting speed by user? That would not get in the way of most legitimate research, but it would render P2P movie sharing useless.
And I was annoyed when WVU blocked access to Napster, hiding behind the lie that it used too much bandwidth. I knew the guys who worked in the NOC; we never used anywhere near the amount of available bandwidth.
"entrepreneurial" staff and faculty members began using devices, called multiport repeaters, to plug more than one computer into a single network port.
That sounds pretty cool - maybe I'll get one of those to replace my hub...
So internal (i.e. resnet) usage continues unfettered? One person downloads The Two Towers and the whole school can get it. I don't see how the cap will make a huge difference in the long run.
I have a friend at Vanderbilt, he has a 200 meg per day quota. If he exceeds that quota he'll get a warning the first time, and the second time he will loose his LAN connection.
I have heard other stories as well where they have monthly quotas and then get charged - or more often - service revoked.
--------
Free your mind.
Are they serious? Hell, I get that much SPAM a month. But in all seriousness, this is pretty weak. Really weak in fact. that comes out to ~66MB a day.
:)
So much for playing games online, downloading game demos (those things are like 150-250MB a piece) and I don't think you can even download Mandrake's entire distribution (though that may be a sympton of Mandrake's bloat)...
Hey, I guess this will make Gentoo take off
In Sherbrooke (Quebec) where I studied, they found a solution to this : a fileserver on the university network. You want a distro? Get it from there. And yes, they support more than one distro.
Benoit
My school should implement the same thing, because there are Kazaa installed on some of the machines and get hacked ;-)
I'm sure the conspiracy theory people will see this as a suggestion by Microsoft to stop students from getting those pesky Linux iso images.
That is the dumbest thing I've ever read. How often do you download Linux ISO images? Its one of those "Hey, if I mention Linux, maybe I'll get posted" lines. It was unneccessary (but surprising it wasn't michael, to be honest).
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
This is packet shaping how it should have been implemented since this P2P craze began...
Cornell students:
Whip up a little distributed program that people can run on their machines. When a bandwidth addict runs out of their 2GB, Internet packets can be forwarded and micropayments credited, undercutting Cornell's prices! The program automatically directs packet requests to the users with the most remaining bandwidth, and you can set a maximum forward limit, to save a little Internet for yourself.
Perfect for those students who don't use 2GB per month.
...
And they thought schools were for learning :)
Ladies and Gentlemen the great John Nash.
From observing my friends, my enemies, and even thine professors here at CU, the CAP comes because of the incredible usage. With 500kbs and up transfer speeds from Cornell to elsewhere, it was bound to happen. Geeky friends have topped 20 GB of transfers in a night, and secondary computers used solely for storage on the network at not unheard of even in the dorms at CU. Currently, students are charged over $45 dollars a month for the use of Cornell's Uplink to the internet in dorms. Next years plan shows that this cost may go down, but so will the allowed bandwidth.
Sometimes I'm told, "People suck!" I often respond, "You're a people!" I'm a people, too.
--even a broken watch is correct twice a day.
Why not order or buy a box copy of your favorite linux distro? Maybe people should actually be supporting the linux distro companies. It's a hell of a lot cheaper than buying windows XP.
I'm sure if some people actually supported Mandrake by buying their product they wouldn't be going out of business now.
Stanley Feinbaum, professional journalist and master debater! God bless the USA!
I mean, the toughest part about this plan is the "making friend" bit... but I'm sure that's not too tough, right? Any one?
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
Of course, Cornell won't decrease the fees that students pay for their LAN access. They go from unlimited usage for X dollars per month or semester to 2 GB for the same X dollars.
Why can't you buy a bigger pipe? Cornell could make some good money off the 'bandwidth hogs,' who would never feel it because it's paid for by either a) Mommy and Daddy or b) Financial aid anyway.
uhm that should read -1 off topic and too sick for /.
Blank CD sales. Who needs to download an iso when you can just grab a CD of one from a LUG. Consolidation of resources is the way to get around this capping. Done correctly, P2P should consume less bandwidth than the normal internet, as all the traffic would be local. But does anybody recognize this? No.
...when I went to Cornell. Then I might have spent less time playing Quake and hording mp3's, and more time on academics...
2 GB is 400 singles. I don't think more CD sales are destined around Utica.
With my subscrition to Ten.com it is easy to push 2 gig in a single day.
At my university, those few privileged enough to have unix machines in offices under their complete control often set up IPsec tunnels from their dorm machines, because the dorm net connection to the outside world is prioritized, and anything other than port 80, port 22, port 5190 (AIM) and a few others goes painfully slow. The main campus network is not on a prioritized router, and the connection between the dorm net and the main net is not either, so people use that to play nice low-latency quake. If they implement something like that here, unless they're metering at the switch to the dorm room, people will get around it.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
"I suspect the more rebellious ones will be running an assortment of proxies and redirections to get around the restrictions."
I suspect that the majority of the people with that kind of know-how weren't the users causing the bandwidth problems in the first place. At my school, the heaviest abusers were usually people that didn't have a clue what they were doing. For example, one girl left a file sharing program running overnight... which was set to share her whole collection by default. She was completely surprised when the IT staff called her the next day to scold her for using over 50 GB of bandwidth in a 24 hour period.
Of course, with that in mind... I'm not sure how much the bandwidth charges will help initially given that many of the students don't know they're abusing anything. Just a little file sharing program running in the background...
The only thing funnier than people whimpering that bandwidth is a right are the folks who get mad when you don't really feel like giving your DSL line away for free through WIFI.
On my network I have seen some very sad, sorry, and sloppy things go down. I have folks who clog up the network and don't even know it. They just install some p2p software, fill up their hard drive, and leave the software running.
(Cue BOFH) and they are always so surprised so come in on Monday to a reformatted machine...
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
The university I used to attend (and still have friends at), Iowa State University, fairly recently had to look into something like this.
..iastate.edu. For instance (this doesn't exist anymore): cjhuitt.stures.iastate.edu.
They started off by monitoring bandwidth, and cutting anyone off who had sent more than X amount of data outside the campus network. To get your connection back, you had to go to a certain office, plead your case, etc. And then you were put on a monitored connection.
Now, they have moved to a more tolerant policy. After a certain amount of uploads (I think it's just uploads) in a week, your connection is throttled down to a small amount. That amount is enough for simple things like page-requests for the web, but basically kills things like hosting multiplayer games.
For the curious, they track it based on the MAC address. When you hook a computer up to the network with a MAC address that isn't in their database, the only thing you can do is view a form over the web that requests your ID and password (the same as e-mail for most users). They reset this database once a year to clear out old info. It's certainly possible to spoof to an existing address and get that person's bandwidth limit, but since this is a permanent-on network, that would lead to general badness with the routers not being sure where to send things. At least, that is what the officials say, anyway...
A benefit of doing things this way, that I appreciated, was the ability for them to give you a "permanent" URL to use to access your machine. They mapped the DHCP address they gave you to your MAC, and allowed you to specify a hostname. Then you could access your machine from anywhere with the URL
You mean, of course, CD-Rs once everyone discovers the sneakernet.
--
I romp with joy in the bookish dark
With any growth of restrictions placed on their network, we could expect that wireless communications will increase as individuals find alternate routes in and out of the current infrastructure.
At my school, if you download just about anything during the day, or download anything over aboug 5 megs at full speed (about 1.5megabytes/s - its an oc3) you simply get cut off. No questions, and no getting it back.
That's a bunch of shit. Cornell is filled with student son scholarship or scraping buy to afford, my best friend is in the ROTC there to pay for his college. It's a very difficult engineering school, that you would be so lucky to have been accepted to.
Anonymous Cowards - Oh God, How I hate you
Cornell's change is a Good Thing(tm) in that they will encourage private entities to provide metered, regulated internet service to the members of the campus community. In this way, the individual members, not the aggregate, will be responsible for paying for the proportion of resources they use. Because, after all, when everybody agrees to divide the check, most of the people at the table order lobster. It's time for the liberals at universities to drop their Ivory Tower facade and face the fact that human nature is a greedy algorithm.
However that was before they handed you an email addresses with your student ID. I did spend a year at a small private college that did issue every student an email address, and their IT resources were centrally controlled. I presumed individual departments didn't handle student accounts anymore since most students these days have addresses like @school.edu and not so much @math.school.edu.
Of course, we did have the advantage of shopping for the best accounts. IIRC, the math dept had fewer students so each account had 4 or 5 times the disk space as an engineering account.
did anyone really stop to question before complaining about how this is a bad idea (2gig cap)? How often do you download 2gigs of mp3s a month, or atleast share them. And even if you are some big server sharing, you can always just reduce the load a bit, programs like bearshare (etc) have trasfer capping built in. Not like anyones goinna miss that much mp3 traffic anyways
It's been a while since I've been to college, but I have to wonder if students factor in network availiability when choosing colleges, and this might actually make some students attend a college other than Cornell.
From the article it seems like the charge above 2GB is probably $1/GB (they actually said a fraction of a cent per additional MB, I'm assuming that fraction is 1/100). That's not too bad so you could still download a few ISO's and not pay a lot, but then again students don't have a lot of money to start with.
At any rate, putting any artificial limits on bandwith for students and professors seems like a poor idea...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If he exceeds that quota he'll get a warning the first time, and the second time he will loose his LAN connection.
Just replace the jack at the end of the cable, and your loose LAN connection will be fixed.
yes!!! in christ's name we pray amen!!!
My university did 200 Terabyte in 2002. This is with email though, which is approx. 10 to 20 percent.
Why all that trouble?
Why? Is there going to be a sudden rise in the amount of cash in college students' bank accounts when this policy takes effect? Now it has been a while since I've worked in a college town, but I didn't exactly see the local businesses lowering their prices to accomodate the relative lack of buying power that many (if not most) college students have. If anything the prices tended to be higher. It'll be interesting and/or amusing to see the RIAA attempt to place some kind of positive spin on the news that CD sales are still down. Who will they blame next?
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
I'm a Cornell grad and I still use my cornell.edu e-mail address. And yes, it gets a sizable amount of spam. Maybe this bandwidth limit is to prevent spammers setting up relays from resnet computers.
Older story on this problem
Hey, if it slows the flow of spam, I'm for it.
For a university, the only real concern I can imagine they should have is the cost of outgoing net connections so I would wonder what efforts they have undertaken to minimise bandwidth usage? Do they have any decent caching technology in place and if so how will bandwidth be accounted for? For example I get a new laptop and install debian over the network, forget for a moment the fact that I could probably have used an internal mirror and avoided the charging altogether. So am I charged for the 1Gb I downloaded or am I charged nothing because someone else had already primed the files into their cache? If I am the first person to install Slackware 9 am I charged with downloading 1Gb or is that 1Gb diveded by the number of people who subsequently pull it from the cache? It would be a sad state of affairs if it became the responsibility of the students to create the network required to minimse bandwidth use rather than the university themselves. I realise of course that gaming is certainly not going to be cached, but how about multicasting to save on streaming bandwidth? Also they don't appear to be going to any efforts to designate "legal" traffic which is integral to the functioning of the university/faculties/students from "leisure" traffic which is simply about quality of life. All in all I wonder if they aren't simply trying to make more money not save it.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
In the article they talk about the bandwith tracking being router based. It sounds like they should be able to track traffic between machines on the network separately from traffic off net.
If so, then this could be a big incentive for people to start creating on campus mirrors for large content that is often retrieved.
Of course, this could be good or bad depending on what is being mirrored. I personally would mirror linux distros, or similiar things, but people could start mirroring movies, music and pirated software as well.
If you think you're entitled to use as much network capacity for as long as you want because you already pay tuition, compare network use to printer use. No-one expects to be able to print 10000 pages a day, day after day, on the department printer for free. This is because it is understood that each page costs something. The marginal cost of transit of each packet on Internet1 is non-zero: universities are billed for traffic.
Internet2 traffic is a different matter: the marginal cost of transit of a packet is zero, and there's plenty of capacity to play with.
-- Stanislav Shalunov
What the heck do you think the university network is FOR? They aren't in the ISP business. Games? Get an account somewhere ELSE for god's sake...I thought you were at university to get a degree??
Oh wait, this is slashdot, home of "everything should be given to us for free regardless of legality"...not free as in beer or speech, free as in "gimme gimme gimme".
"I couldn't afford to research the paper, sir..."
Resnet at Cornell is, at best, a real shady business.
;) ). It's really disappointing to see how much they've changed things in the past couple years. I'm happy to be moving off campus next year.
The reaction from most people around here has been less than enthusiastic. You can easily burn through 2 GB of data in a month just by visiting ESPN.com to check game scores, or visiting any other media-heavy site. They claim it's better than the alternative (Roadrunner cable) and say that we're given options. Actually, we're not given any option if we live in the dorms. We are not allowed to have a cable internet connection installed, though most of the rooms have a cable jack installed already. Hell, we don't even get basic cable TV for free (little dongle on the cable wire apparently blocks cable...though, we did fix that problem early on in the year
We actually had wireless access points in some of the dorms (in the common areas like lounges and study lounges). They got pulled this year due to "lack of funding". It was great, some anonymous donor supplied the money for Cornell to set up wireless nodes all around campus. And now they took it away.
As if Ithaca NY didn't suck enough, now they're trying to limit our contact with civilization. Fantastic.
As a student, I know that I dont have much money in the bank. So, that being said, my school has a great strategy for dealing with bandwidth useage!
If you go over a certain amount, ours being 500meg in 10 days or less, you get knocked down to a lower bandwidth region, and you can get at max 2k/sec. You can still view webpages and everything, just not download movies/etc.
This is annoying at times...however when you are in the fast bandwidth region, the speed jumped up considerably after, and internet access in general is much better when its super fast.
Even if I wanted to do some casual downloading, it was not a problem as long as I did not exceed my limit, and intranet bandwidth was not included.
It is a great idea, way better than the pay for more (for students).
[I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
I went to Cornell ('01) and one thing that was VERY popular were entire bootleg movies on the network neighborhoods (~650 megs each). Those would get passed around so quickly or simply viewed over the connection. My friend even got busted for having like 40 gigs of movies he was sharing with Cornell kids and FTP.
However, I don't see Cornell's point since we were CHARGED for our internet usage, and this charge was something that was comparable, if not higher, than simply getting off the dorm LAN and splitting a cable modem with your roommate(s). Then again, if Cornell only makes it a nominal fee (more of a symbolic fine), I can see them having a claim. It'll be interesting to see how it develops.
My school technically has a 750MB/24hrs limit but I just plugged in an extra two nics and now it's not uncommon for me to do more than 2GB a DAY.
Holy crap. How can people satisfy all their pr0n and warez needs at Cornell with a mere 2GB per month?
- http://pakman.sytes.net/
Even accounting for people that do this, Universities will save loads of bandwidth. The few and far between that can do this will do this. The vast majority of kids sharing out their e:\mp3 drive will be affected, to the gain of everyone else on campus (reduced network strain = less frequent equipment upgrades; faster DB access for inside comuting, faster comm between universities).
robi
...and now this. So they've made it easier to get into school, but once you do, slap your wrist for setting up a pr0n server!
I wonder if this has anything to do with students being used as relay for spam. I know cornell doesn't implement any sort of spam filtering -- at least not for alums using their email server for forwarding.
So I'm sure a lot of that bandwidth is for mp3's, warez, and what not. But what about grad students that use up more than 2 gigs a month for research purposes? I don't go to Cornell thankfully, but I do research on MPEG1 videos over the internet. These are high quality videos which eat up a lot of bandwidth and can easily pull a gig in each experiment that I run (especially since I have streams going for a day or two). Would they be so callous as to charge graduate students doing legitimate research?
I see nothing wrong with bandwidth limitations. I do however think it is absolutely ludicrous for a group to do a bandwidth limit without an unrestricted FTP/HTTP proxy service. As the article said, the students will probably be crafting their own shared proxy services anyway. The cost of a few non-redunant 1U servers or something to run a proxy service is far less than the cost of increasing bandwidth (over a few months). Any organization, school or otherwise, that thinks that restricting bandwidth usage is a benefit doesn't understand the nature of real users... they will do whatever it takes to get more out of it. Give them a solution that is agreeable to both groups and you won't have 80% of the problems. Setup a few non-redundant 1U servers. Let those devices access the Internet. Make the bw restriction very low and tell students and faculty that they should use the proxies. Set the proxies to keep files up to 800MB or so. The end result is that ISO of linux come down once, software that is commonly installed come down once... etc.
This is Slashdot, home of the double standard. Around here it's always "gimme gimme gimme", to hell with what you think. Everything should be free! Even university-based internet access! Fuck academics, I wanna play Unreal Tournament! How dare they impose bandwidth restrictions! It should all be FREE! It's a conspiracy we should all fight! Quick, where's the link to petitiononline.com?
...while I don't agree with this idea, can someone come up with a way for uni's to pay the bandwith bill, not raise tuitions, not charge for "extra" bandwith, and not hinder students who have legitimate reasons for that kind of bandwith at all? If so, then you can complain about this policy. After all, if the university can't pay it's bandwith bills, it can't award grants for research.
The problem is really that most p2p software doesn't make much of an attempt to take the physical network's topology into account when it creates the virtual network of peers.
Years ago, before napster took off, I described what was essentially an idea for streaming p2p (didn't call it that) to a friend who is a very smart networking specialist, and he was horrified. I think he had visions of chunks of video being passed from kansas to hong kong to iowa to france, etc. I was too lazy and not skilled enough to follow up on my idea, so I lost my place in history.
But my friend's criticism was valid then, and it's valid now, and as these services become more popular, the chickens are coming home to roost.
It seems to me that if p2p software allowed people from a specific school to look for files on each other's computers first, and to go outside of the campus only when necessary, a lot of bandwidth would be saved.
So students who live in residence, and who therefore pay for their internet access via a portion of their fees, are "stealing the university's research bandwidth" every time they do what YOU'RE DOING RIGHT NOW - accessing the internet for non-work-related purposes? I agree with charging/limiting bandwidth "hogs" (for the other users' sake), but I think your statement ignores the fact that the institution should _not_ have any more say than any ISP over how student use what is in effect their _own home connection_. It's not like they can get Rogers to come and run a cable connection to their room, after all. They have no choice of ISP's.
Freedom: "I won't!"
Here's a question born out of my own ignorance of how this works, but if you used a connectionless protocol would the monitoring system still work? Like, let's say I have a computer in my dorm, and NFS mount a box outside the network and bringing in massive amounts of data. Would it still show?
Speaking of which, I'm downloading redhat right now. I spent an hour on the phone this morning and no computer stores are selling it...The story from the smaller stores was "what is that?" (2 years ago a few of the same stores had a copy on their shelves). The larger ones recommended I download the copy of the internet.
You may or may not think this is funny but I deleted my entire hard-drive last night playing with those iso's. Helped me make-up my mind anyways.
Every time RH releases. It's easy to do
and it's a great way to keep ahead of the curve.
I'm sure the conspiracy theory people will see this as a suggestion by Microsoft to stop students from getting those pesky Linux iso images. At least, according to the RIAA, CD sales around Cornell should now skyrocket :)"
In this situation, I would just go to the nearest computer lab and burn the ISOs to CD. That way, you're using the lab's bandwidth rather than your quota.
-Shippy
Admitted, the students that have this; should have secure networks, but it's hard to do that especially at such a "tech heavy" school.
It's almost guaranteed that high bandwidth users will sniff out said networks and use others, probably not even coming close to maxxing their own account out.
Certain enterprising students may even resort to selling their bandwidth.
Alumni should rebel and get as many wireless accounts as they can and just claim they don't who's using what.
Then, the issue becomes what are you allowed and not allowed to have in the privacy of your backpack / dorm room (wireless)
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
I agree that some sort of limiting plan needs to be in effect for a University's bandwidth, but this seems to be overly restricting. I run an FTP on my University's connection and routinely exceed 3GBs per month! I simply can't imagine being restricted to 2GB a month.
Watch out, or I'll have the penguins eat you.
Oh...and, I'm liquid talent
I don't think I would like this system. It seems like it might be easy to steal someone's bandwidth. There was mention of tracking by the MAC addresses. Someone could run a packetsniffer or watch for ARP broadcast on the local segment to collect Mac addresses and IP numbers. Then they could just use a card where the MAC address is software settable. (My Linksys router has this ability too, for example.) Wait for the unsuspecting victim to go off line and then set your card or router to show that MAC and IP pair. Poof! "Free" internet access for a while.
The only way I could see to stop this would be for the university to set their switches to make the switches and their connection ports only accept traffic from specific MAC addresses. They couldn't allow any open public ports with this system. Even with that though, someone could still wait for their roommates to leave for a while, then highjack their port and steal their bandwidth while they were gone. (Even if they can't log into their roommates computer and use it that way.) Or perhaps, they might just swap in a laptop for a lab machine.
Dunno. Just seems like it might have problems.
I go to rose hulman (http://www.rose-hulman.edu) :-) ;-)
the way they deal with it is they restrict the bandwidth for various services. for example, kazaa goes so slow it is almost not worht using. they also keep track of how much you download on MAC's registered to you, so if you go over 1GB in a day, or 1.5 in 2 days or something like that then you get a nice little letter from the it department. i dont think they actually charge you for going over though, they just take away your access if you do it too much
but alas, as someone else pointed out mac addresses arent too hard to spoof if you have a router, are moderately clever, or just find some program to do it for you (arp poisioning, what?)
People that seem to think that is fair, tell me, at point do you know what your network usage is? A page, 50 kb, a few pic's here and there, another 1MB or 2. What about Windows downloads, like service pack updates, or software upgrades, program uploads. Does anyone really KNOW how much bandwidth that they actually use? If you don't know what you use, then how can you say whether you are near the limit or not?
I do alot of research at work, as well as casual browsing. With every web site attempting to force gif's, mpgs, bmp, wav files on every page, not to mention configuration files, adware programs, anti-virus utilities and god knows what else is making every attempt to make sure that you GET THE FULL EXPERIENCE OF THE INTERNET, I certainly would not want to be charged on a hard set limit.
Life is bad enough without every pion out there trying to nickel and dime every transaction and calling you bandwidth thief if you don't pay for it.
...since I'd go through a two gigs of quota on pr0n alone. ;)
You all know that the big reason for the bandwidth usage is mp3's, so why is this a big deal? Linux images aren't that big, and if you're all so worried about downloading images, then take a load off your local mirror and burn the damn thing for your buddy instead of making him download it and burn him/herself. I don't even come close to using that much bandwidth unless a new Linux or Oracle or whatever comes out, and if it became and issue, I'd either shell out the cash, or find away around it.
Bandwidth costs money. There is absolutely ZERO reason a University should be sending 100 Terabytes outbound per year unless they've got a particle accelerator running. If the little twits are using bandwidth for mp3's, make them pay. I'd much rather the University be able to afford bandwidth for cancer research or high energy physics data than spending that money so some stupid little dorm rat teeny-bopper can get the lastest Brittney Spears single.
Come on, 2GB/month limit is a joke.
Many new online games use about 20KB/s of bandwidth which is 72MB/hour. Basically this means that you can only play 27 hours in a month, or less than an hour in a day.
Funny how this security breach at Princeton never got the media attention it deserved:
t
http://www.ispep.cx/files/tucson.princeton.edu.tx
Mod this up as Informative...
Ever need an online dictionary?
Cornell machines run a kerberos client and a user logs on the same any where on campus. This is used to track printing also...
We have something similar (although less Draconian) at my school, the University of Connecticut. If we ever exceed 5GB of in/out traffic in a seven day period, our transfer speeds are squelched down to 64kbps, from the insanely high T3 speeds we're used to. I'm never hurting for files though, because the students have implemented two different ways of getting around it. There is a Phynd server, which if you're not familiar with it, indexes all windows shares on the network every couple hours in an easy-to-search database, and we also just recently set up an on-campus DirectConnect hub. Between these two, and the 15,000-odd undergraduates we have, I can find just about anything I want, get it at around 1.1 mb per second, and not have it count against my bandwidth limits. Problem solved.
Here in Portugal almost all ISP have bandidth limits like 20GB Nacional and 1Gb International... If there were mirrors but not only a few mirrors only with RedHat ISO's, so we don't have access to large Opensource projects. And the technical support *sux*, they only know what Windows is, if you ask them what Linux is or even a Mac they can't answer you... The only good ISPs are ViaNetWorks and KPNQwest...
The Stone Dance of the Chameleon
Can someone who knows or has access to knowing how much in general universities are charged for their internet connections, please chime in. I'm guessing it is per MB per month or something like that, which means that allowing P2P sharing DIRECTLY increases costs for the university's internet connection, probably drastically. What are they supposed to do, watch tens of thousands of dollars a month get washed away so students can download movies?
It sucks.
/Very./ We're split into two campuses--medical and academic (perhaps you've heard of MCV Hospitals)--and we're actually not even in the same ZIP code, we're so large.
... We have big-time pipes.
;-) (700 KB to 1+ MB from Akamai-backboned stuff like downloads from Apple.com, for example). Go VCU.
...
...
/sold,/ in the salesman sense--the university new networking hardware. I don't know what we replaced (some have told me it was Cisco hardware) but the decision has been one with terrible consequences.
/could,/ we /would have by now./ I wonder exactly what we've "upgraded" to/with, because it doesn't seem to be doing a very good job.
/your fault./ ... But no, that's not how things are.
/in writing/ for the students that abuse is against university Internet usage policy, look for abuse, track down the abusers, and actually enforce it. Abusers lose their bandwidth entirely, for example. Repeat offenders go on academic or residence hall probation.
/more/ gets abused and eaten up by the same people asking for it.
/really/ pissed off were it not confined to the residence halls. ;-)
This is a given.
But what else are universities to do when their asshat students leave crap like KaZaA on 24/7?
Here's a nice little essay for you:
Here at Virginia Commonwealth University, we have very serious bandwidth.
We have a lot--a LOT--of bandwidth in order to support the two campuses and the hospitals here. We have OC-3s and DS-3s and GTA-3s and See-Deez-Nutz
Here's our problem.
The residence halls alone are currently using 50% of the entire university's bandwidth to the outside world. Of this amount, roughly 90% of that is taken up by P2P apps like KaZaA and Gator.
I'm not making this statistic up, sadly.
The students come to us and say, "Why doesn't VCU just give us more bandwidth?"
We always reply, "Because that's what we used to do, and the only thing that happened was more file sharing."
This is simply obvious to any Slashdot reader.
Good: VCU has quarantined residence hall bandwidth. At my desk, I get great speed everywhere that hasn't been Slashdotted or Farked.
Bad: This is easily solved, but not with
Well
Welcome to state schools. Apparently, some time in the past year or two, someone (I believe Dell, as the university higher-ups are suckers for anything with Mike D.'s logo on it, regardless of if it's not the best purchasing decision for the situation) sold--and I mean
Apparently, VCU doesn't have the ability to do anything at the individual node level, like impose speed or usage caps, other than turning a port ON or OFF; the only thing we've been able to do is quarantine the res halls' subnets from from the rest of the university.
I say this because it seems logical that if we
At least, that's what I would have done, had I any control over the situation--every student gets, essentially, N amount of kilobits/sec. Something reasonable, something fair. It doesn't take a TON of bandwidth to be enough for students in the residence halls who need to check their grades, download assignments, and do research--even enough for gaming and doing light Internet file sharing. (Where inter-LAN sharing doesn't have that restriction, of course.)
The students are responsible for themselves, like the adults they technically are. Wanna trade files over KaZaA all day? Fine, it's your node allotment, use it any way you wish. Don't complain about slow Internet speeds anymore, 'cause it's clearly demonstrated that it's
Of course, I'm not stupid. That has issues associated with it, too. Another idea would be to put
No pun intended, this is all academic.
Everyone's at fault in a lot of universities, whether it's the students and a bad IT department or the students and bad adminstration. Here, the students want more to get work done and such, but when they get more, the
No, not everyone's abusing it. But as anyone on teh Intarweb knows, it's a very large percentage of the people. And even if it isn't, and the minority is hurting the majority, it's still up to BOTH the adminstration/IT people, to police their turf--and the students, to police themselves.
I'd be
-/-
Michael Watson
Apple Service Representative
Virginia Commonwealth University
http://www.vcu.edu/
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
If we /. Cornell's web site(s), who pays for _that_?
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Dear Michael:
Please either shut up, or post your comments as comments like the rest of us have to.
Did you know that Cornell's campus network uses centralized Kerberos authentication? No, you didn't. Please explain how proxies and redirections are going to keep them from billing you for bandwidth used when they can keep track of who you are and how much you're transferring independent of IP address.
http://www.cit.cornell.edu/computer/students/bandw idth/charts.html
I've been told that the problem actually has a lot to do with employees and graduate students with too much time on their hands... streaming audio is also a big thing. Still $4 for each 2Gb/month seems VERY restrictive, especially for people who utilize the campus net for making backups and such. I think that they should regulate usage according to time of day since you can actually use up that much bandwidth in under two hours if connected through a decent port.
When I was an undergrad we had a few GB per month limit, if you went over your port was limited to 56.6Kbs. This only applied to traffic exiting the schools WAN and to students only. Not traffic staying inside. Our CS prof setup ssh accounts on his linux box and we just DL through that. There will be ways around this too....
Implement an application proxy firewall, and require authentication. If the protocol doesn't allow authentication, then it doesn't get passed through. Plain and simple. It's what we do at the company I work for, and although it can be a pain in the ass sometimes, it puts acountability on everyone, as it the administrators wanted to, they could look at exactly how much work related traffic you are generating, and how much isn't work related. They just log right now, but the option is there.
Perhaps movements towards this billing structure will lead to a greater appreciation for local mirrors of common data over P2P. If a college charged for bandwidth that left the campus network but not on the interal residence hall (for instance), then Joe Collegestudent might then begin to have a greater appreciation for the type of local caching that becomes available through the (possibly anonymous) peer-based file sharing systems.
Rich
The anonymous donation was to put wireless in all the libraries, NOT all over the campus. The access points were removed from the dorms because CIT and ResLife couldn't come to an agreement over who would pay for them.
Any decent university is going to have an FTP server for student use. If the administrators or students are any kind of good geeks, they're going to mirror all open source distro sites so that students have access to the images without blowing their bandwidth cap.
If they DON'T have an FTP server...well...now you have something to bring up at your next student government meeting.
This message brought to you by the Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People.
this might actually make some students attend a college other than Cornell.
Anyone who is taking "capacity to l33ch" into consideration when choosing a college is not someone I'd want diluting the value of my Cornell degree anyway.
then again students don't have a lot of money to start with.
I know I didn't when I was a student, but that never stopped Cornell from charging us a fee for anything and everything. Too bad I wasn't one of the rich kids who could just call up Mommy and Daddy and have another $5000 deposited in my bursar account...
...more like "Girls Gone Wild" DVDs...
My alma matter way back when went to implement disk quotas on a VAX which was used by the majority of the 2200 student college, as it also happened the mail accounts. Initially, overnight without warning they set one limit for all accounts, mainly because the average student never purged and compressed their mail file. 2 days later they temporarily suspended the quotas, since the entire computer department could not log in since they couldn't even create temporarily session files to log in with. Nobody could do their programming assignments etc.
Finally after several weeks of thrashing around between staff and very angered students they re-implemented quotas but they varied depending on how many comp. classes you had and the requirements for that particular class. Which was a little better and met the needs of 95% of the students. However, it still stifled the student who liked to tinker and program on his own, especially if he had no computer courses that semester. This led to MUCH sharing of accounts via shared passwords.
Of course in the meantime while quotas were suspended, one of the students ran a program to suck whatever spare bytes he could (from people compressing and deleting) as fast as he could. The box sat at about 0% free space for a week before they finally caught on to him and suspended his computer privileges entirely.
Anyways, the point being that one limit for everyone never works. Ask a Cable ISP. If they set the level right it might be above what 95% of the population really needs, but what about the truly computer savy student who is downloading linux ISOs or various other software that is a more valuable hands-on experience than any class could teach him?
I could see a "Bandwidth Economy" springing up because of this. Low-bandwidth users "selling" their excess bandwidth to the high-bandwidth users. Or maybe certain classes would require a certain amount of bandwidth, and so the students would have to purchase it along with their other class suplies (it'd be an interesting way to teach an economies class, with some hands-on experience).
For Sale: 2GB bandwdth. Like New! Hardly Used! Call 555-1212 with offer. NO PERSONAL CHECKS
Ed Wedig
Graphic design services
docbrown.net
My brother is currently an undergrad at UIUC, and they already enforce bandwidth restrictions, although they don't charge for exceeding them since they literally stop your connection before you can. The cap is for off-campus traffic though; as long as you stay on campus you can move as much data as you want, which makes sense, since it's free.
What he and his friends have done is to set up a distributed network across several dorms and use the slack bandwidth of the members' connections to download/upload from/to the internet, and then use the free campus network to move the data to the desired machine.
In essence the result of this is that instead of 10% of the people taking up 90% of the bandwidth, you get 50%+ of the people taking up their entire quota, with the net result being the same amount of data is still moved.
I browse Slashdot at +3, Funny
I think they are going too far out of their way by watching account usage and trying to charge for excessive use.
What may work better is to just set caps for usage (by IP/userid/dorm floor) which just cut you off when you've reached the limit for the week.
They started doing this at Oregon State University for the modem pool when it was getting too busy.
Invariably students would say, "But I need net access for school work!" to which they would get the reply: "The computer lab in the library is open has network access and is open 24 hours..."
"There are people who do not love their fellow human being, and I _hate_ people like that!" - Tom Lehrer
Even if only half of their undergrads live on campus (I know nothing about Cornell so i could be wrong) but thats ~6750 dormed students and it wont be hard for them to hit the 'unbelieveable' mark of 100,000GB if each is allowed 24 a year...
jeff
I bet it will cost the poor guy who just tried to share some pages with friends more than his tuition. Charging for bandwidth is a bad idea, because a lot of traffic - slashdot, worms, buggy research projects, DOS attacks, windows update, P2P and so on - is not something user can control or measure until the bill arrives. Limiting speed is better, especially if the limit only takes effect after you used up your daily quota of unlimitted-speed traffic. In any case, there should be liberal exceptions for students doing research projects (like Internet search, multimedia streaming or P2P protocols) that might use up a lot of bandwidth.
I agree with those posters who say Cornell's network is solely for educational purposes. As long as Cornell provides access to outside broadband providers (cable, xDSL, FSO, wireless), there should be no problem with people putting two NIC's in their machines and dual-homing them. I mean, shit. I can pop down to CompUSA and get a 100baseT PCI NIC for about $10. Bottom line: the school is obligated to provide for students' education, but not their entertainment. Another solution is for Cornell to completely get out of the business of providing connectivity to dorms and open it up to those companies providing access to MDU's (multiple dwelling units) -- and there are plenty of those companies. That way, the economics would cease to be distorted and those who use up a resource would have to pay proportionally. It's the same argument with water. I think it's silly that many apartment complexes include unmetered water useage with the rent. This distorts the allocation of this resource, as some people will wash their SUV's daily, whilst others hardly use water at all.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
I go to a university which has had bandwidth problems as well. We have a nice net speed (10mps), but instead of charging for total bandwidth, students at my school have unlimited downloads but capped uploads. It seems that 99% of the time, bandwidth problems come from students leaving P2P programs (i.e. KaZaA) on 24/7, uploading gig after gig of movies, etc. With a cap of 10 gigs a week (which is very reasonable for ligit purposes) of uploads, the school has fixed the main problem in bandwidth problems (uploading off campus) without causing students to react negatively. IMHO, Cornell should reconsider the move to capping so low, because there are many legit reasons to need more then 2 gigs a month; if their lines can't handle more then that, it's time for an upgrade.
take off every sig for great justice
Nobody really cares what you suspect, Michael.
I really REALLY wish you'd stop adding your little 0.02 to the stories. It annoys the hell out of me, and FWIW, it makes you look like a self-absorbed idiot (which you probably are, but why make it public?).
It's obviously inevitable that the free ride we've enjoyed would come to an end with the introduction of rate metering. It's going to hit our American broadband ISP's as well. As our society evolves into one more based around the transmission of information, it's going to become a valued economy, one that can no longer be given away for free.
Those of us with cable modems will need to use it while we've got it.
Note that rate metering solves alot of problems at both ends. Right now there's a disparity between clients with unlimited bandwidth and servers who pay for theirs. This disparity is why serving is so expensive, Joe user doesn't think twice about downloading the *same* 10 megabyte movie trailer 10 times in one day.
Give Joe user a rate meter and he'll start considering ways to use his bandwidth more efficiently. This will translate into lower server costs, which means we'll end up with more and better content.
This is truly a good thing, client side rate metered bandwidth can't be implemented fast enough IMO.
...for all five CD's. And while I may not be downloading them every month, I usually switch to a different distro on one of my machines evry 2-3 months & they're the latest version (final or beta). This basically means that I would be going over my limit every other month just from distro downloads! What about the rest of my stuff that I do on the Net? This has nothing to do with piracy. Is it a sizeable contirbuting factor? Sure. But this will stifle students desires to go nuts over a braodband connection - a bad thing by anyone's standards.
And who says they're not for entertainment? Students need to unwind, too. Most schools force freshman to live in dorms. Other students can't afford anything other than the dorms. Are they not allowed to kick back & play a little BF1942 or something after a long day? Have you seen the tuition bill for Cornell? This is most likely an attempt to pass the buck for over-paying on bandwidth by the school.
I think CU should limit bandwidth if the costs are getting out of control. After all, I'd hate to think that my alumni donation dollars are going to pay for some pimply kid to download warez all night. My main concern, faced with that kind of cap; would be: how many hours of D2X/CS/Q3/UT2003 can I play a day? Anyone here know how much bandwidth an hour of gaming can suck up? Hmm, maybe that cap will actually help people spend more time studying and less time playing video games.
"The article mentions that last year over 100,000GB worth of files were sent from Cornell's network. I'm sure this is not the only school doing this or moving to this. I'm sure the conspiracy theory people will see this as a suggestion by Microsoft to stop students from getting those pesky Linux iso images. At least, according to the RIAA, CD sales around Cornell should now skyrocket :)"
Yeah, and if my ass had wings, it would be a flying doughnut.
--250$ for all that bandwith for a year? I pay roughly 20 clams a month for dialup in my rural area. I have my choice of that or I guess some satellite thing at a ridiculous cost. That's roughly the same they are paying now at cornell for high speed, no wonder it's cost effective solution.. Why stop there, subsidised gasoline, subsidised groceries? And it's less than a dollar? Maybe they should try an even dollar a day, 365$ a year? I fail to see how anyone could complain over broadband for a buck a day, I'd pay that if I could even get it.
I got a better idea for the uni, stop providing bandwith at all, fergettitaboutit, let the market and the individual students decide, let the local ISP's in that area duke it out instead, OR, cornel charge what it really costs, which has got to be more than that 250$ a year.
I'm at the University of Rochester (about 90 minutes from Ithaca, where Cornell is) and I must say, this worries me somewhat. Now, my school doesn't have a download limit but instead has a upload limit of X GB per week. (I'm not sure of the exact number anymore) The first time you go over, you get a warning, the second time I believe you get cut off for a couple days, and the third time even longer, and so on. I think a system like that is much better than charging students per GB. That's just insane.
For a student paying $30,000+ a year, why should they be charged for bandwidth? If they want to do something, they should block the ports that Kazaa uses or throttle everyone's connection to 128k or 256k. Just my opinion.
David
Cornell will still continue to charge students their special "captive audience" prices for student housing and pay student employees minimum wage for work where the normal salary is at least double that.
What a waste of bandwidth! I know this is par for the course with college networks, but step back for a minute and look how stupid it is. People have P2P apps running 24/7, snarfing up more stuff than they'd ever have time to watch, listen to, or whatever. At least if they have lives, or do any studying at all...
If you have time to watch a movie, you have time to copy a disk and run it down the hall. And if you actually did the math for the bandwidth costs (for what the school pays for their main pipe), sneakernet is probably cheaper. If it wasn't, we'd probably have video-on-demand already.
Could something like this turn out to be a real boon for Freenet to get a critical mass of users in one area?
fencepost
just a little off
So why are students paying 45 dollars a month for 2 gigabytes when 47 dollars is double the bandwidth?
I use Gentoo, a Linux based on the BSD ports system, where programs are installed and updated by downloading the source code and compiling it, all automatically. It's super convenient. Gentoo has almost every open source program on its emerge system, and I rarely have to open a browser to download a program that I want to install.
I've installed quite a few programs since I installed Gentoo, and, obviously, this takes up far more bandwidth than downloading the binaries. If it weren't for my ISP allowing unlimited downloads, I'd max out my limit pretty quickly. What's more, everything I'd be downloading would be 100% legal, since I wouldn't even think of using more bandwidth for movies or MP3's.
Obviously, if I were studying at Cornell, I'd have to give up using Gentoo altogether and go back to Slackware or some other distro with an inferior package management system.
This space left intentionally blank.
Unless you have to log in, this is an e way to get around the usage cap.
I've got 1mbit DSL at home, but if I need anything really big it's faster to drive down to the library and download it there (~600kb/sec).
ECAC Hockey Champ! Kick Harvard's ass in Tourney!
Everybody dies frustrated and sad and that is beautiful
I'm a freshperson at University of California Santa Cruz, and bandwidth was a huge problem at the beginning of the year. It was almost impossible to simply surf the web during peak usage hours, mainly because of all the P2P clients running. It seriously felt like a 28.8. A few months after school started, the school implemented a 2GB/day bandwidth cap. If you go over the cap, they cut you off until you call up and they explain what happened and then turn you back on. It's not meant to inhibit students lives or to police them, simply to allow people to use the campus internet connection at reasonable speeds. Since they implemented the cap, students have become aware of their P2P usage and aren't leaving their kazaa clients online and sharing 24/7 effectively killing the college's bandwidth. Now the connection is fast throughout the day, and people are rarely kicked off any more because they learned how to manage their downloads and uploads. And as far as I'm concerned, as long as I'm paying to live on campus, the internet connection I am given is for whatever I see fit, not just for "academic purposes" as someone else stated, just like the water out of the faucet isn't only for academic purposes. 2GB/month seems a bit harsh, but capping student's bandwidth is a good thing in my opinion as a student who has to share a connection with thousands of others.
Nothing from nowhere I'm no one at all
I don't know the Cornell situation, but I imagine they have unified logins, through NIS or something similar. The proxies that might be used would be something on the order of, "I only transfer 1GB/month, I'll let you use 512MB through my proxy if you pay me... type arrangements.
Cornell is one of the few universities left with an online learning arm, called eCornell.
I wonder if they are also metered by the university? If so, I wonder if they pay the same rate, since they return money back to the university?
they get 2gb a month? we only get $20 worth per semester. im not sure how much that works out to in MB, but it aint much.
Damn, Sam, I do more than on my 53K dailup account!
it's a conspiracy to keep people from downloading emacs.
1/100 makes it $10/GB, which is outrageous
.003 cents/MB
I go to CU, and rumor has it the fee will be around
This little news came as a surprise to me and will probably tilt my decision away from Cornell.
I really like CMU's wireless access and of course MIT and CalTech both have good networks. I don't
think I will use 2GB/month, but if Cornell starts charging for it, who knows what's next?
The University of Washington has a wireless authentication system set up so that you are initially firewalled off from the Internet. When you attempt to access a web site outside of washington.edu, it performs some voodoo magic to redirect you to an authentication server. After entering your username and password, it removes the filter and redirects you back to the site you wanted to go to. The only slightly annoying aspect of it is that if you only want to use an instant messenger program or check your e-mail from a non-UW server, you must first visit a web page. When your DHCP lease expires and isn't renewed, the IP is automatically filtered again. While IP addresses can be spoofed, you won't be able to receive much since the computer of the legit user of the IP address will kill any TCP connections you try to establish. A similar system could be used to track bandwidth per user.
Since they can't use the network for transferring files, they'll just do it the old fashioned way. Burn to a CD or DVD-R and pass them around.
OK--this is a bit of a rant, but relevant--
...besides--I get the good stuff over Inernet II mirrors ;)
Bandwidth costs money. The economy sucks. There's a money shortage.
The internet usage at Universities is for RESEARCH and LEARNING. Downloading pr0n, warez, illegal copies of software, video, and music, stupid video clips of your friends lighting farts, game demos, etc, are not included in your "internet rights" on any campus office or residential housing.
You buy those rights with your DSL or Cable modem agreements.
I'm an IT employee at a major private university. Our residential halls are throttled back because kids kept using KaZaA and other mal-ware to saturate the copper so much that REAL work began to suffer.
The University is like a company--it OWNS the network gear and reserves the right to enforce policies.
I can't believe the number of lamer nihilistic imature snot-nosed trolls posting bitches and rants about their rights. SHUT UP already--grow up, get a hair cut, learn to use your "skilz" at being a "haX0r" for something good and quit trying to subvert the system with ignorance....
What I would like to know is if internal network usage counts toward the 2 GB quota? If you share your files via Network Neighborhood, AppleTalk, etc. then that usage is completely contained within the university. To my understanding, most of the costs come when the university pays for bits being sent and received to the "outside" world since they have contracts with ISP's to handle that traffic. My freshman year of college (when mp3's were popular, but before Napster), I could get tons of files just browsing Network Neighborhood. And the university did not have to pay an ISP for that usage since it was all internal. That would be pretty lame if the university charges for internal usage since I had a great time playing networked games with others in my dorm when I was an undergrad.
"Oh dear, she's stuck in an infinite loop and he's an idiot" -Prof. Farnsworth (Futurama)
University officials sent out letters to researchers -- including those who, for example, move around large amounts of sky-telescope data -- to warn them of the billing changes. The university offered "to round off the sharp edges" for researchers who will be adversely affected.
They better had! The assumption that high bandwidth use is all down to music filesharing and other "non-work related" activities is not necessarily well founded. I work for a different large US university and regularly need to transfer data from the other US universities or europe to analyse. I can get transfer rate of 250-750k per second depending on the time of day. This translates to very roughly 1-2 Gb per hour and I might spend all data selecting datasets and leave the transfers going all night and maybe the next day too, to get what I need. A transfer of upto 100 Gb over a couple of days followed by a month or more to analyse the data (before I need more) is not unheard of. A 2 Gb per month limit would stop my research in its tracks and there must be people at Cornell that need similar bandwidth to me, for their work.
This sounds more like a money making scheme than a real problem. Universities usually get charged a fixed amount for their external connections, whether they use them or not. If they have maxed out their connection and everyones transfer rates are sufferring then slapping quotas on the undergrads, who don't do any work and so shouldn't need large amounts of bandwidth, is the answer. Charging users is just money grabbing since the money isn't going to go to add more bandwidth, since the demand for bandwidth will have fallen when the charges are intoduced.
I suspect the more rebellious ones will be running an assortment of proxies and redirections to get around the restrictions
No, actually, only the freshmen will be in a position to be interested in the bandwidth limitations. Each year past that, the rate of students living on campus drops off sharply.
Then again, the type of people (L337 h4x0rz) who would be getting around the bandwidth limitations probably stay on campus all four years, but they probably work for CIT anyways, so they can just h4x0r the system directly...
Is internal traffic charged? The implication is they only meter traffic which crosses the campus "boundary" but it's the sort of thing you would want to be clear about. Is Internet2 traffic charged the same as Internet traffic? The whole point of I2 is to make interesting uses of tons of bandwidth. There's a reference to researchers moving large amounts of telescope data which sounds like an I2 project and they only offered to "round off the edges." Since many I2 projects deal with terabytes per month, I guess they're just have to seek new grants or close down. Webmonkey just had an article about I2 which featured a project at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Bye Bye birdies!
The biggest problem with this kind of per-user billing is there are no practical ways for the average person to monitor, or in some way control, their own bandwidth usage. They talk about people making "informed choices" but also say that most traffic is out-going Kazaa traffic and that some students aren't aware their computers are used to serve data by Kazaa. I bet most students don't know they're computers are serving all those files, they certainly don't know how much data they're serving. This is just a big example of something I've thought about for a few years; today's applications and operating systems are simply not transparent enough for anyone to make an "informed choice." Sure, Slashdot readers know about things like client/server and P2P architectures but how the hell is a regular person supposed to learn this stuff? Even if you do know what those things mean, are you sure you know what each particular program is doing? Once something has been around a while, most people can learn what to avoid but every time some new program comes along, a lot of people will be caught unawares.
[friend at other university]: "Hey [cornell student], try this cool thingy to add to AIM, it'll let all our friends play music for each other."
[cornell student]: "Thanks [friend at other university], I will."
[1 month later]
[cornell student]:"Network bill for $XXX.XX?! Looks like I'll have to spend my summer being a test subject for medical experiments instead of working on that very educational research project."
Be careful during your next all weekend campus game!
Can you imagine the Monday morning bandwidth hangover? "Yes Johnnie, your dorm racked up $35,000 in charges. Will that be cash, check or charge?"
Damn, I mean my heart is breakin' here because you guys are set for 2 Gb a month. I'm at an Australian University with over 60,000 students and we have been on a user pays system for almost 2 years. 65c per 10Mb for international stuff, 25c per 10Mb for local and all of it coming down a lousy T3 (which is about as fast as you'll get out here). We get $15 a semester worth of redit which can last anything from a week to a fortnight. I'm sorry to hear other Uni's are following suit. On the upside redirection and tunnelling will become very familar to your students in the near future!
at Lehigh.edu they're implementing a new capping system done by physical jack instead of MAC address (previously used and exploited) 500meg up or down in 12 hours then capped for 72. what's interesting is that i signed a user agreement outlining one cost/use schedule but more interesting than that is that living on campus i have no other option if i want net access. installation of dsl is impossible, and cable is not permitted. our way or the highway kinda sucks
Vanderbilt the real world? Cheap? I'd love to take some classes, wanna pay the bill for me?
cdrudge is smart, like a donkey.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
CD sales around cornell will skyrocked. Blank CD-R sales. If its going to cost me to send some mp3z to my friends or stream them to a lab on the academic side I'll buy a USB keychain and some CD-Rs. Remember, a 747 full of burned CDs has more bandwith than any fiber optic connection there is. And if you use DVDs, or 3.5" drives? ph33r that. I mean, 10 CDRs and a car has more bandwith than most of the world has. Depending on how far and such.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
As an undergraduate I worked on some astrophysics research that required me to transfer gigabytes of data back and fourth per day, sometimes it also had to go to outside the university (as we had collaborators at other universities). I'm not sure how this is going to work.
Another interesting point is what happens to people running things like debian and gentoo linux? Where files are constantly being downloaded and updated - believe it or not the downloaded files can add up very quickly.
I think that this 2 gig cap is rather short-sighted.
for the accountancy. The only machine I'd know about to do a user-by-user and site-by-site statistics is the notorious ISA. Chances are, this is an attempt by their IT-department to justify huge investments into M$. At least here they do likewise. Probably bolstered with arguments by the local M$-rep.
As an alum from the Napster days, I remember when they put the bandwidth limitations into practice. There were people on campus supposedly doing transfers in excess of 200 gig/day of movies and napster files. When the upgrades to the network were announced the profs were complaining that they couldn't get files downloaded worth a damn. They tried to restrict use during the day for the profs but that didn't quite work when people set up 24-hours servers for all kinds of things. But remember, this is a university who gave priority for computer networks to the Greek houses over regular dorms and some of its own staff at one time. I really liked that university, and respect anyone enrolled in its engineering or pre-med divisions, but it had some computer regulatory practices that didn't always make 100% sense.
As long as there is a Second Amendment, there will always be a First Amendment.
I'm sure the conspiracy theory people will see this as a suggestion by Microsoft to stop students from getting those pesky Linux iso images.
I alredy knew Slashdot is bullshitting, but this is sort of testing the limits of being an idiot, dumb, stupid.... I don't know what's beyond that.
Cornell needs to realize that by making students upset, they are jeapordizing their future revenue stream from alumni donations. A *much* better strategy is to do the following:
1) Set a very high cap (say 100GB/month) above which people would be expected to pay for extra usage.
2) Increase the official monthly fee to cover the extra useage.
3) Offer students *cash* back if they use less than 100GB/month. The amount of the cash is a monotonic function of how much they are less than the allowed limit and can even be adjusted to incorporate penalties for causing congestion.
For the majority of students, this will be experienced as a slight increase in dorm rent (a small percentage of what they already pay, and in many cases absorbed by their parents... not felt as a subjective taking away), a mildly happy feeling as they can use the net as much as they like, and a very happy feeling when they get cash back. This incentive for behaving well will get them a lot more goodwill (and possibly even creative schemes to reduce useage over the network) than having a penalty will.
Heck, even the RIAA should be happy as those students will have a little more spending money to blow on CDs, etc.... Undergrad students like having spending money. It makes them much happier than avoiding a penalty does.
Win-win people.
We have gotten around this at my university.
Everyone uses a peer-to-peer file sharing client that only works within our network. To be on it you have to share at least 500megs. One person finds and shares something, and everybody has easy and fast access.
It really caught on, with now over 1000 users and many terabytes shared. Of the file sharing programs I've used, this system is by far the best.
I bet it has also cut down on the school's internet usage, although I don't know that for a fact.
yess - these are the worst, aren't they? I hate it most when they dance.
reminds me of a dilbert strip where he was in his gf's place (on the computer, no less) and she asks "you've been here quite often lately, wouldn't have anything to do with the fact that interent at your house is broken, right?"
well, something to that extent.
speaking of which, though - Scott Adams was quite skethy on *how* did Dilbert get a gf...
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Write a nice little "message" on each and every one of the bills you fork over to Cornell for Internet access. See how willing they are to spend them. (This might be mutilating money?)
-insert a witty something-
You'd be amazed. The local university had parents in a fit when the new 'honour student' dorms didn't have the promised Ethernet connections.
It's just like a fascist dictatorship, without the punctual rail service!
At any given time on any given P2P network, twice as many people are downloading Debbie Does Dallas as are downloading Daredevil.
...I was kind of surprised to see this headline on Slashdot. For one thing it's old news (this policy was decided on sometime last year). But I figured I'd set some facts straight:
1. This is internet access only. On campus usage is unrestricted. (I noticed one fellow bitching about spam, but that's kind of a silly thing to bitch about since the Cornell mail servers are naturally on campus. In fact, a lot of stuff is on campus when you think about it.)
2. An additional charge happens after 2GB of transfers in a month, however you have to get up to 4GB a month before you are being charge the same amount you would be under the old pricing scheme. In other words, if you don't use much bandwidth you will be charged less than you used to be.
3. This is not an antipiracy measure at all (though everyone seems to assume it is). In fact, it's entirely reasonable. Cornell does not restrict filesharing clients in any way. As a result, there are a bunch of assholes out there who just run KaZaA all day, everyday, and use an absurd amount of bandwidth. We're talking about 95% of the bandwidth being consumed by 5% of the users. This is a really big problem right now and Cornell has to do something. The alternative would be to try and restrict filesharing clients like so many other universities out there.
Under the new policy there is still no restriction on what you can do with your bandwidth. The only thing it says is that if you're going to use a ton of bandwidth then you should pay for it. What could be more reasonable?
Anyway, that's enough for now.
As a cornell student, I currently pay $44.45 a month for unlimited (actually 27 GB/3 days) internet access. Even if the price is lowered to $26.35 a month, the bonus charge is a little over $3 a gig, meaning I can get 4.67 GB of data a month for the original cost. Link to the policy on Cornell IT website
Well, I can't speak for the rest of the Vermont State Colleges system, But this semester my friends at Johnson State College have indicated that JSC has put a per-connection bandwidth cap into effect. The cap is a measly and highly annoying 2.5k sec. You can have 100 connections active, but not a single one of them will be allowed to exceed 2.5k. lame. Lab and office computers are not thus limmited, and neither are the public ports arround campus and in the library, but evey dorm room is capped. if you have a Laptop, you can always drag yourself to a public port, but if your computer is stuck in your dorm room the cap is so low that you might as well have a modem. Thats where JSC student's $60 a semester technology fee goes.
A Call For A New Slashdot Moderation Level!
Costs? What are these costs you speak of? The price of bandwidth? What is that? The price of the electricity flowing through the wires? The cost of the light travelling through the fiber (uh oh -- better not go there!)
Who does your ISP pay for bandwidth? And who do *they* pay? No one is actually losing money if I use up a few extra gigabits a month. Everyone should eat the cost, then there would be no cost.
This policy is a sham. Sure, it will probably satisfy those students who only use their computers to check email, surf the Internet, and use AIM, but it also hurts students who use it for other legitimate purposes. I use streaming media regularly for both academics (especially language study) and entertainment. I also periodically download free software like Linux. I am a high bandwidth user, but its legit-I am not a filesharing fiend. I pay close to $40,000/year to attend Cornell (and we the trustees approved another %5 hike for next year), so why can't CIT and the administration figure out a better solution.
The only reason someone would go to cornell is if they wanted an Ivy Brand name. The thing they'd consider least of all, probably, is the internet service.
Im a second year law student at Cornell and this place is pissing me off. First of all they add a 250$ annual charge to our tuition to cover out net access so making us pay more per usage is ridiculous. 2GB is a ridiculously small sum given that dowloading a single linux distros ISO's will fill the quota (mandrake = 3 cd's). In law school we read and access lots of cases mostly in pdf format with the average size being around 5 megs these days (around 500 pages) plus instructors notes (as long as textbooks in some cases) so honestly just legit school work will fill up most of the 2GB limit per month if you wait till the last minute to download everything. Aside from that Cornell is in Ithaca the most boring place on earth 50,000 people and they are all students! Aside from going to bars there is nothing to do. My liver cant take much more of this. Without internet access you can honestly go nuts up here Im from NYC and am still after almost 2 years not used to this small town bull. Tuition is insane because we are "Ivy league" but we are the bottom of the Ivies and even NYU law makes fun of us. Nope this place sucks should have gone to Fordham when NYU rejected me but its to late now.
im not trying to be funny or anything, but this is where a difference of 1000 or 1024 will make a difference.
We here at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Queensland, AU provide a certain amount of bandwidth to students (I don't actually know how much.) The University covers the cost of this bandwidth (or incorporates it in the fee structure, I don't know) and if a student uses their allocation, they pay some money and they can pull down more traffic (I think the charge rate is about four to five cents per Mb?).
I think that this results in a more than fair system for the students (I should know I was one at QUT).
and too sick for /.
You must be new here, huh?
Sack up little man.
Berkeley allows only 5gb of out of campus bandwidth per person/week. While this is several times what cornell charges, you can still draw some comparions.
They use MAC address verification, so if I change NICs (as i did when i got a wireless card, I have to go down to the Computing center and get the RCC to add it to my profile). Each building has it's own switch and subnet, so I can only connect to the network within my building. This keeps people from spoofing my MAC, as only those within my building would be able to get any gain.
We've also found that many people download the same file, which wastes bandwidth. Using some clever tricks, I have a Kazaa supernode running in my room that only allows connections from within berkeley. Then, after forcing the kazaa client to connect to that supernode, I can see all of the files of people on campus. I find files locally 2/3 of the time and save on bandwidth that way. Some weeks I hardly use any bandwidth while my roomates use almost all of theirs. We put 4 nics in a server and use it as a NAT with load balancing and bandwidth monitoring so that all of us are sharing the same 15gb pool. It turns off file sharing at 14.5gb, which allows us enough room to get web and email through. We have yet to meet a problem.
I doubt people will try to hack and get around the limit. I can't think of a legitimiate use for that much bandwidth anyway, unless you own a massive amount of DVDs and would like to download the DivX files instead of making them yourselves.
I also don't think Cornell needs to go to the step of charging people for access after 2gb. Why not just turn the connection off?
-Ryan
-Ryan
AUWYHSTOT (Acronyms are Useless When You Have to Spell Them Out Too)
What was the problem? Too low SATs? GPA not high enough? No good recs?
Or not connections?
Those fucking facists!
man better then what we get @ uni for the whole year so stop complainging!!
At least in Australia, universities have been doing this for years now. When I went we had a quota, and once this was used you had to pay for more internet access. Postgrads had a higher initial allowance. It also cost more to download from offshore sites, and the cheapest downloads are from other australian universities (in the AARNET network). See https://ias.qut.edu.au/information/Budgets/student Quotas.jsp for the QUT quota system.
I dont get it - the universities I attended or was employed by always had mirrors of all the really big stuff (Linuxd, SP's Solaris etc) so it could only be illegal transfers that bump the bill up.
Simple answer. BIg mirror of pirate stuff on Campus - solve everyones problems
Here at my school we are capped to 5GB a week, with rollover. Its not a bad policy, since only about 2% of the students complain (the ones using 70% of the bandwidth).
We run Phynd to try and lessen dependence on our external connection. There is also a Direct Connect server available, again keeping all sorts of bandwidth on campus.
The main problem with bandwidth is that applications keep increasing in complexity and resources, but most schools won't allow the extra traffic. When our freshmen class came in, bandwidth usage went up 40%, as opposed to the 20% it should have increased.
Why?
Faster computers. Easier data manipulation. People expect a fat pipe like the one (sorta) they have at home.
And the new Redhat is like 5 CDs.
Back in the day, a P2 MMX 233MHz couldn't run the high-bandwidth apps that most websites server. Now, the standard is 1GHz+.
Times have changed.
Just wait till the summer when they start mailing out rejection letters. Some will surely end up with script kiddies....
obviously cornell will be less thought of when considering a school for comp sci. and engineering. Sounds like a bad move to me. I guess the 40 grand a year isnt enough to cover a few extra gigs of bandwidth. Sad.
I personally think colleges should profit off this more, using a bandwidth plan.
100GB/month - 60$
150GB/month - 70$
200GB/month - 80$
Make the prices cheaper then what it would be to get overcharged for going over your monthly set limit. That way a person wouldn't just have to go over it and use as much as they wish without wasting sum of what they would have payed for in full.
We at UConn run a DC hub. Out of thousands of people on campus, we only have about fifty folks on it, but we share about 2TB on a good day, at 10MBit speeds. We pool resources to get newer releases (mostly TV eps) and it all works out pretty well.
UConn people! The hub awaits!
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
This has got to be one of the dumbest things I've ever heard. The college I attend uses packeteer to take care of bandwidth. Basically, it takes care of all the P2P so that other web traffic doesn't get slowed. I am sure my bandwidth is well over 2gb per month, but it is not from P2P, and I am sure such a thing is not possible. My bandwidth usage is from trying out new software on my Gentoo system, and the IT staff is flexible if I just go and talk to them. Maybe Cornell just needs to prioritize their web traffic.
they implemented caps using packeteer to limit the dorms p2p to 20mbps download and 2mbps upload. They did this in reaction to the insane amount of usage, almost 40% of the campus bandwidth.
An interesting paper was written recently by a group in the CS Dept on content delivery systems. They monitored the campus network's border routers for 9 days. The result - Kazaa consumed almost 14TB outgoing and only 2TB incoming. This is in comparison to 3TB outgoing for web and 1.5TB incoming.
What surprised me the most was that more p2p content is leaving the dorms than coming in.
While I agree with the concept, I am currently a Cornell student who can attest that the incompetent management of Cornell's IT department is responsible for many of the costs. We pay $45 a month in the dorms for ethernet! The money is visibily squandered by the fools who run the show.
This 2gb limit is quite necessary. If anyone is in fear of this stiffling inovation fear not, a simple solution of offenders having the opportunity to defend their bandwidth useage.
If the warez kiddies in the dorms can give make a solid defense for why they used 200gigs last month then more power to them. I'm sure researchers could justify usage.
I'm a freshman at Cornell. I run perfectly legal web/ftp servers from my box. According to my logs, since september i've uploaded 560 gigs (this is ignoring everything else i do online). Do the math yourselves, but as you can see, i'm way over the limit. I wouldn't complain, but unlike most schools, Cornell charges us for our connections. It's an additional fee from housing. $50 a month for internet usage. I'd think that since they're already charging us, we'd get to use that bandwidth however we like. Oh well. Thank god I'm moving off campus next year.
As an alumnus ('02) and employee, your accusation that they are 'trying to limit your contact with civilization' is bullshit.
Perhaps you haven't noticed the skyrocketing costs of ResNet over the last few years? When I was a freshman in '98, we paid some ridiculously low price of around $75 per semester. I think it's something like triple that now.
You're not going to go far over 2GB with ESPN scores. And even if you do -- let's say you double that. You get FOUR GIGABYTES of ESPN scores. You have committed to memory an enormous sports matrix of the planet earth for the entire month. So you end up paying a few dollars more that month. Big deal.
The people that CIT is going after are the KaZaa users and the warez groupies. Yes, it sucks that you can't download many many ISOs every single month, but you can still download a distro a month and not worry too much. You think roadrunner is an alternative? That's what I have now, about 100 feet from campus. For $40/mo., I get an average speed of about 100kbps down, half that up. No bandwidth limit, sure. 2 IPs.
For $26/mo., I get TEN TIMES that speed on campus and as many IPs as I want. You know how far over the cap you'd have to go before you hit $40/mo.? I don't either, but I can assure you that it's A Lot(tm).
Oh, and to everyone who says "augh, all those poor CS students, I hope they all leave Cornell." This is just the main campus network, operated by CIT (Cornell Information Technologies). There is a whole seperate network that the CS folks get. I don't have any idea how it works or who it's with, but it's Very Special, better than ours, and I guarantee you that they are downloading and uploading things a lot bigger than ISOs there all the time. There is no way that the CS faculty would allow anyone to hamper them like that.
Yup. i got warned then banned. reduced bandwith because i download too much crap online. now this page takes forever to load....why, why, why, i thought i paid enough to the freakin school!!!
URL?
I've had this sig for three days.
In related news, CU is apparently building a new nanotech lab on campus. Just exactly what I wanted to study when I was there, just a few years too soon! (I studied biochem among other things then graduated with Asian studies, and did computer stuff in my spare time).
Of course I would have been in sheer hell since not only did I have to trawl the engineering library for the proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH as computer courses conflicted badly with Japanese, now I would also probably have to pay for the privilege of downloading genome sequences to my dorm. 2 gigs is totally like, not there.
whoring for karma.
How many people go to Cornell anyways? ~50,000? It sounds like they aren't that far off of 2 GB /month already...
moot point
You wanna hear something crappy? My university in Australia gives us only 100MB worth of external traffic PER SEMESTER, PER STUDENT. This is if we access non-uni sites.
looks like they'll be trading a lot of midi files.
http://www.vanillaafro.com - take me seriously and I will shoot you
Having gone to this worst of the ivies, I can tell you that they would put coin slots in the drinking fountains if they could cut through their own bureaucratic red tape.
Having read the article and the comments, I think that the point is being missed here. The restrictions will apply to research staff. If I can be blunt, Universities really don't care about students beyond furnishing them with the education necessary to be a candidate for the degree in question. Its certainly not their job to furnish entertainment. If you have a problem with this, grow up and live elsewhere. You have my sympathies, but if this upsets you, you are really misunderstanding what higher education is about.
What is worrying is that this could hit researchers. 2 Gig a month is nothing for most academics in any field where use is made of computers (ie. whole of the science faculty at least). This said, I guess money from research grants would pay for it in the majority of cases, but it seems a shame the Cornell is further hamstringing people at the bottom of the ladder for whom research funding may already by stretched to breaking point. In a sense, they just made the tenure ladder that bit steeper. Bear in mind that the institution will already be likely pocketing an overhead from those grants that have already been issued.
In my place they've policy to charge only internet access while allow unrestricted intranet access. With proper configured proxy and community effort, downloading large files like Linux's iso/packages would not be an issue.
Later we might implement batch download request for large files downloading. However, reading thru it I don't see they've the sense and technical clue to implement such a fair policy and this would affect their legitimate academic research VERY much.
I wondered this policy is coming out of the minds of clueless managers who has never been admin a campus system for a day. I don't know how pirating mp3s and movies would be a problem to them, it's kinda easy to track them down - unless of course their compus rans by bunch of MCSE who cannot tell why bandwidth usage would be skyrocked.
(apology to the rest MCSE with clue. So far I haven't met one with clue in rl)
It would be bad if they just send a bill saying "sorry, pay up". I hope that they at least shut your network off when you reach the limit and that you then have to sign a contract saying that you are willing to pay the extra charges.
It is just the honest thing to do after all. I never saw the good thing in fooling poeple into having to pay money they don't possess in the first place, by fooling them never the less.
The real cost in the Internet is the infrastructure, why aren't we all paying flat fees for our fair share?
There are completely different price structures at each level of the internet and I don't see why.
1. Time -- Dial Ups by the Hour
2. Data -- ISP's pay for the data they use
3. Infrastructure -- The big guys are paying for the DSLAMs etc... they put in but not really anything for data at all.
Why don't why pay an infrastructure fee and forget about the data?
Why not pay for what it really costs, not another abstraction?
In the UK, the JANET national academic network went through a period of charging individual institutions for their use of JANET transatlantic internet links. This was instigated because at the time, the costs of maintaining acceptable access provision were outstripping the available funding.
;-)
Essentially, institutions would be charged 0.02UKP/Megabyte of traffic entering the UK across the Transatlantic links to the US (although this may have included traffic from almost anywhere on the globe). In some institutions,t his charges would be apportioned and re-charged to the relevant departments, or in some cases even to individuals. At one institution I previously worked at it was discovered that 80% of all chargeable traffic could be attributed to student residences! As a result students were given a download quota, and once that quota was consumed, access would be blocked until more credit was purchased.
Unfortunately, as more lines were added the central JANET traffic accounting systems could no longer keep up, and eventually, when new high speed links were brought into service, the idea was dropped as it was proving too difficult (and costly) to accurately account for all the traffic.
That said, the concept of charging for use, is still being discussed, although no-one seems to be able to agree on how best to do it!
In the meantime, we just happily chew up the 2 x 2.5Gbps pipes!
As a side note, part of the old charging deal was that you could avoid charges by using the national web-caching service. This worked reasonably well when demand outstripped network capacity (we only had a handful of OC-3/STM-1 pipes then). We no longer have a bandwidth bottleneck, and the web-caching service was formally closed down at the end of 2002.
It seems that throwing bandwidth at the problem really is the simplest (and perhaps the cheapest) solution.
Looking at the scholarly discussion about spoofing MAC's (Or not), don't they use there in Cornell account names and passwords to get access to the network?
If that is the case, as I believe is, than, The U can bill the account for the accumulated bandwidth usage, regardless of platforms MACs and all other means, other than accessing using stollen accounts' data.
Essentially, this seems like a great idea to me. The university sets some threshold for usage, after which higher charges kick in. That threshold actually helps the university estimate their typical bandwidth requirements to the ISP, since most users will have an incentive to gravitate to their limit. However, usage above that threshold is still available, albeit at a higher price. The university can use the additional funds to contract for burstable pipes, when demand exceeds nominal contracted bandwidth. As nominal usage creeps above the 2G mark per IP, the university can buy more constant bandwidth and reset the threshold. The high bandwidth users essentially help the university plan and pay for their current and future bandwidth requirements. So long as the "tariff" on high bandwidth use remains manageable (in terms of budgeting) for the end users, the system effectively self regulates.
Sometimes I worry that I'll develop Alzheimer's disease, but no one will notice.
What they are talking about here is Cornell's residential network. When you are on campus in the library, computer lab, wireless, etc., they aren't charging you more for bandwidth, that cost is placed on the department providing you with the connection.
That said, students at Cornell typically live in the dorms for only their freshman year, then move to an apt. off campus. I can't provide real numbers, but I can tell you that I don't know anybody who lives in dorms, nor have I (except for maybe a couple) since I was a freshman.
This means that probably a majority of Cornell undergrads are using RoadRunner, not ResNet(the dorm network) RoadRunner is far more expensive than ResNet, yet ResNet is faster and more reliable. All in all, I highly doubt someone would choose not to go to Cornell because you have to pay a couple of bucks extra for using lots of bandwidth.
sure nuff man that is ridiculous expensive. Live off campus then, 800 clams for a room is way way way too expensive, you can get a house note for that kind of money, let alone a couple of people sharing one at 1600$ a month.. I'd even consider just another college at those kinza prices. So I'll agree with you there.
I think this will get sorted out soon all over pretty quick anyway, the US and the rest of the planet is undergoing an economic reversal. I think you are going to see prices drop severely sometime soon on just about everything as people wake up to the fact that "some" job at a reduced rate is a WHOLE lot better than *no job*. The situation in the US right now in particular is worse than the situation that was happening in roughly the late 20's. Just no one wants to really admit it, except for the people who are in a true "depression" from their personal job loss. There are going to be some MAJOR shakeups in people's pre conceived paradigms and personal sense of what priorities are. If you read what warren buffet is saying lately, you'll see he agrees and gives some details to that point of view. We aren't going to collapse to caveman levels, but we have only burst ONE bubble of several,that was the overvalued stock bubble, there's still to come the pension bubble, the real estate bubble, the banking derivatives bubble, the petroinflated dollar as opposed to the euro dollar and muslim gold dinar mess, and the rest of the accounting/corporate illegalities bubble. Add in governmental completely out to lunch spendingand meddling,and we got some more rough times ahead, which will probably last at least a decade or even longer, much longer if the world can't avoid a series of major resource wars over oil and water.
I like your way of thinking, but I have to raise two points, just playing devil's advocate.
.edu? Only if it's related to class? Only if it doesn't involve any Hollywood actors? No mp3's?
First, how do you define educational purposes? Only accessing
I hope I won't have to belabor the point. You can't define it. It's undefinable. It's like if you went into a library and said "only educational books." Shakespeare read the pulp fiction and shoddy histories of his day and produced the greatest art of western civilization.
The hubris, the smashing stupidity of a school demanding to "limit" it's network to "educational purposes only" is simply breathtaking to me. Prevent abuse. Write clever rules on your Cisco. Heck, even enforce the law! But don't ever try to dress up some hamheaded censorship regime as "education."
The only other point I'd make is about the competition to provide internet service to campus dwellings that you mention. You have to think bigger. The campus dwellings themselves are a racket. Even in public universities it's common practice to force undergraduates to live in the dorms for at least a year, and if you live in the dorms you're required to buy into the meal plans, etc. All of which cost multiples of what you can pay on the free market for rental spaces, restaurants, etc.
Of course, you can pay more, too, if you want to live posh and eat fancy every night. But when you're poor and on financial aid that doesn't quite cover everything, it's infuriating that the schools perpetrate this racket - forcing you to pay $700 a month in rent when you could pay as little as $250 off campus, pay $11 a meal when you can cook for yourself for $2, or pay McD's $5...
So, fuck internet... force them to make _housing_ competititve.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
Cornell probably needs to renegotiate their IXC agreement if they're paying by the drink themselves. Sounds to me like Cornell is trying to put some teeth into file sharing policies. I'm sure that those doing research and academic work began to complain that data transfer rates weren't fast enough. 2G/Mo. is reasonable for crossing the domain border. Most everything one might need is done usually mirrored on-campus by somebody.
Universities also get audited from time to time and are responsible for unlicensed software installs. It's reasonable that they would want to protect themselves from hosting illegal activities--and yes, like it or not, sharing MP3s is illegal unless you own the copyright. Despite all your rage you are still just a rat in a capitalist system.
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
If the "fraction of a cent per additional MB" is 1/100 of a cent, that means it is $.10/GB, not $1/GB.
Oh, yeah, I am going to go out and buy a boxed copy of Gentoo right now! Then I'll never have to download anything for my OS again!
At University of Massachusetts amherst, i have a total of 4 nics in two boxes. I've run full time ftp servers. All the sudden one day last year, the office of Information Technology decided to start cracking down on bandwidth usage. And me, uploading 15-25 gig/day was one of their first targets. Instead of shutting down, i setup an ftp redirecter that made it look like all the bandwidth i was using went through the student webserver using a simple application level unix program.
Unfortunatly, one day that program crashed and spawned a million broken proccesses, and i got shut off again.
Then i realized all i needed to do is use more nics, register them under different names, and voila, i can run 5 gig/day/nic. Becuase university policy states that content shouldn't be monitored, they can only guess at what i'm serving.
This year, they bought more bandwidth and shut off all the kazaa users who leave kazaa running all day while they are at class. We pay 30 dollars/semester for a 10mbit jack, of which i've been able to download from other universities at up to 9mbits/sec.
Thankfully, umass is somewhat intelligent, and allowed an on-campus P2P filesharing system to be setup so the border routers are constantly hammered by 10,000 people all downloading the same linkin park album. RIT and other major universities also have direct connect hubs that limit usage to on-campus students. And they rely on people who have connections to actually bring in the newest material the latest. Wtih a fiber backbone, who cares who many people are sharing things locally.
The important thing to realize is that 30,000 students and faculty aren't goign to just shut off kazaa. And 2 gb/month is ludacris, especially for an elite private school that costs $30,000+/month to attend.
Universities also host a plethora of hacked nodes that are transformed to XDCCs on IRC channels to server 1337 goods to the hungry masses
Maybe is cornell took better care of securing their library and faculty computers, they wouldn't have sucha huge bill to pay every month. My guess is the majority of the traffic doesn't come from resnet.
While my university (RWTH Aachen, Germany) isn't as tightly integrated as american universites are (dorms etc are provided by a variety of organizations independet from the uni) the uni does provide internet service to the dorms. So time ago bandwith became a problem, so they firewalled off some p2p programs. Now, people could get around that fairly easily, so they did one more thing - they created an DirectConnect Hub inside the fireall, open for anyone to use as they like.
Needless to say, the bandwith problem has gone away overnight. And the students are happy because the amongst the several terabyte of data in the hub there is almost everything they desire. And if not, they go FTP it and drop it in their share - problem solved.
OTOH, the music/movie industry doesn't seem to be as rabid here as the are in the US of A, so maybe such a project isn't posssible there.
If you're sharing it with your friend down the hall, it's not costing the university anything. Sure it puts a _slight_ strain on the network segment, but it's internal traffic, not metered bandwidth that goes outside the university.
Even if that's true, the real problem is that for the convenience of each other, you have all this crap being shared via P2P apps, which don't discriminate between the downloader down the hall and the world at large. So in fact, you're using your univerisity's resources to offer a free movie and music download service to the entire world. Even big media companies can't afford to do this, which is one reason why they haven't.
Significantly, they mentioned that departments are using private ip-space routers to reduce the number of ports they buy. The problem they are facing isn't that the departments are using the routers, it's that the departments are controlling their internet network infrastructures. That is the job of the campuswide IT department for most universities. The IT department can make sure that everyone's network is up to a certain standard, and provide better access for some other departments which are willing to pay for it. The total network infrastructure management job is done very poorly if it is split into several fiefdoms, with each department paying someone to manage their own little section of the network. Centralized IT can keep troubleshooters on call 24/7. I'm sure that the English department, for instance, does not have the resources to pay for that QoS for their internal network. They may not even have someone qualified to determine who to hire or who to assign the duty of managing their network and computers.
Whee! Represent that internal DC hub!
There's too much anime and not nearly enough porn on it, but that's a minor quibble. Point is, this should have been done years ago. And now we all bask in the glory of the hot, naked downloads.
'Course, if the university let me get a DSL line in my room, I'd still rather have that. They make a shitty, overpriced ISP.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Where I went (Rice University) usually people stayed in the dorms for three years, then went off campus the senior year... that's why I was thinking it would matter more to people.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Do the computers in the lab require a login/password? The college's around here don't, just swipe your student ID when you enter the lab and it's all yours. Slip your ZIP disk in any of the PCs (every PC has it, cept the Unix box's) and download all you want.
Think this will just be an annoyance to students and make many of them question why are they paying all the extra technology fees for their dorm rooms if they can't download all they want when they could be paying LESS for uncapped cable modem??
I just don't get it, I mean if ISPs can operated successfully and allow uncapped broadband then why can't a university? The students DO pay an extra technology fee for the access, so what's the difference??