Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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
and why would you want to render that useless? P2P is the reason why most people get broadband. Cornell students actually pay an added fee of 250$ per year for their network connection on top of their 30,000$ a year tuition. I say Cornell should quit bitchin and open up another OC3. lol
Anonymous Cowards - Oh God, How I hate you
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.
...
Here at UC Berkeley, we have a thing called AirBears (http://airbears.berkeley.edu/). Before you can use the net, you have to login through a web page, which is a proxy to kerberos authentication. This is a pretty easy to use setup, and I'm pretty sure that the login is simple enough that even something like lynx or w3m could use it. The only problem is that there is more than one wireless net access service on campus, and they don't all use the same authentication method as AirBears.
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.
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.
"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 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
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
Because they are students.....there's a reason why the Educational version of applications are usually much much cheaper.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
How will the smart kids get around this? Perhaps finding students with no computer and negotiating to let them hook up some kind of wireless solution so they can use their bandwidth as well.
Perhaps the kids will figure out how to make it look like they're really other users in order to get their bandwidth. Ethically perhaps not great, but when the going gets tough...
As for downloading files, perhaps this will bring out more of a community spirit -- users should pool their resources. Instead of 50 students downloading a game, 5 will download it and share it via CDRs.
I have no doubt that the enterprising students will either find ways around (or at least optimal solutions to) the caps.
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
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.
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.
or perhaps they will do like they did with the dorm phone systems when the colleges got greedy, go elsewhere...
I remember not to long ago the universites complaining about how they were losing money on dorm phones now. They got greedy, over-charged and found out that inovation isn't dead, it just needs some prodding. Now most on-campus students use cell phones, the universities are still REQUIRED to maintain an expensive phone system and they get no money for it...well thought out plan.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
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.
and why would you want to render that[P2P] useless?
Because it uses prohibitive amounts of bandwidth?
Cornell students actually pay an added fee of 250$ per year for their network connection
That's roughly the monthly bandwidth charge for a T1; amortized over 9 months, $250 is a better price than you're likely to get for broadband anywhere else in the US.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
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.
Consider the phone system. Do you expect to be able to make long-distance calls for free from the dorm?
Cornell is a member of Internet2. Therefore, the packets they send to other universities have a marginal cost of delivery equal to zero. This doesn't make packets that go to cable ISPs free.-- Stanislav Shalunov
Why would it render it useless?
I'd assume that Cornell are only looking to charge on traffic outside of their own network. Thus, P2P within the university wouldn't be restricted.
Such a charge would just mean that, instead of 200 students all going and getting their own copies of the latest movies, a few of them would and the rest would get it from those few (via the local network). More efficient use of resources, and all that. Work out a roster scheme with your friends.
"Software is too expensive to build cheaply"
The problem is that with very fast connections that dorms get the distribution of used bytes per user is heavy-tail: if you were to average costs, 90% of users would be billed many times what they have used. (And the monthly fee would still have to change every month.)
-- Stanislav Shalunov
Your $45/month fee covers (a fraction of) costs associated with running the campus network plus a reasonable amount of used capacity. Cornell defined `reasonable' and now charges per bit for everything over. Way to go!
Do you or do you not currently use more than their newly established quota? If you do, the new billing system is a bad news for you. If you don't, it is a good news.
These quotas are selected so that most users will be well below.
-- Stanislav Shalunov