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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...
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
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.
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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.
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.
This isn't an anti-piracy move, though -- this is a move to cut down on the amount of Internet bandwidth for which the University has to pay.
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I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
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.
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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
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.
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.
...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
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.
This is quite true. I was a member of a focus group on this idea, and they said that use of the internal campus network was consistently at about 2% of capacity. External capacity has hit 100% in the past, causing them to limit Resnet traffic to a certain percentage of capacity. They would be quite happy if file-sharing were more internal. (Happy, that is, to the extent allowed by law. Cornell complies (somewhat grudgingly) with the DMCA.)