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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.
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Free your mind.
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
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!
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.
...
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.
...when I went to Cornell. Then I might have spent less time playing Quake and hording mp3's, and more time on academics...
"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
You mean, of course, CD-Rs once everyone discovers the sneakernet.
--
I romp with joy in the bookish dark
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.
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
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
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
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.
...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,
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!"
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.
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.
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...
/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.
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.
...more like "Girls Gone Wild" DVDs...
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
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
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.
im not trying to be funny or anything, but this is where a difference of 1000 or 1024 will make a difference.