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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.
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
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.
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.