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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.
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.
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Free your mind.
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!
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!
But available bandwidth doesn't usually mean it's 'unmetered' in terms of cost within the amount available.
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.
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
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
Probrably because the school doesnt WANT to reach their peak bandwith. They dont just get bandwith for free... They have to pay an upstream provider just like the majority of the rest of us. There are very few of use that are fortunate to be a Tier-1 provider. You school probrably - i have no idea of what their actually agreement w/ their telcom is - is that they pay for X bandwith but a rise to X' will cost them money. They have X' prime bandwith to use however they pay for X and have to pay an additional fee when they rise to X'. For example you may have a OC3/T3 line put into your company but have it capped at 25Mb/s but if you have need to rise to 45Mb/s you can call your telcom and ask them to do this. This is perhaps the reason your friend in the NOC thought you had more bandwith then you really did. "Sure joe we have and OC3 here..." but he neglects/doesnt know that its only a partial OC3.
...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.
Remeber that a 56k modem has a theoretical maximum of 17G/30 days,
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!"
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).
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.
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.
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.
...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.
im not trying to be funny or anything, but this is where a difference of 1000 or 1024 will make a difference.