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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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.