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OSL Gets Bandwidth Donation from TDS

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the take-advantage-while-oss-is-still-a-buzzword dept.

kveton writes "The OSL is pleased to announce that TDS Telecom has donated 600 Mbits of connectivity in order to ramp up their mirror infrastructure. The projects hosted at the OSL can now upload to the mirrors co-located in the TDS facilities in Chicago and Atlanta via their main data center in Corvallis, OR."

73 comments

  1. Now THAT'S a tax write off :) by MLopat · · Score: -1

    Just in case the significance of this is lost on some people, here are some facts. 600Mbits of bandwidth is 5 times more than the entire rest of Oregon state university uses combined! This will allow 50 million people per day to download free software. This kind of bandwidth is usually measured in $$'s, and this is a multimillion dollar donation to a great cause.

    Currently, the top ISP's here in Canada value bandwidth at $20/Gigabyte. so 600Gbit/sec = 75GigaBytes per second, times the number of seconds in a year (31,536,000) = 2,365,200,000 GigaBytes... so by those numbers, they could write off upwards of $40Billion per fiscal year!

    Congratulations TDS and OSL!

    1. Re:Now THAT'S a tax write off :) by A+beautiful+mind · · Score: 2, Informative

      You seem to have mistakenly assumed Gbit/s instead of Mbit/s!

      600Mbit/s is not a huge thing to have.

      --
      It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
      Be yourself no matter what they say
    2. Re:Now THAT'S a tax write off :) by MLopat · · Score: 1

      Yeah, you're right. It's 2:30am, so insert sleep deprived excuse here... On the other hand, that's still a $40million/year donation and that does seem more reasonable.

    3. Re:Now THAT'S a tax write off :) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      A 1Mbps line allows for about 1Mb multiplied by 86400 seconds per day, demultiplied by 8. This ends up at about 10GB of traffic per day.
            Are you telling me that a 1Mbit per second connection cost upwards of $200 a day (located in the ISP's datacenter)?

    4. Re:Now THAT'S a tax write off :) by MLopat · · Score: 1

      No, I'm not saying that. But ever since they started capping home subscribers' broadband connection to anywhere between 10 and 100 Gig/month, some ISP's have started charging an additional $20 per GB. You probably won't hear much about it though, see all we're a pretty complacent culture here Canada.

    5. Re:Now THAT'S a tax write off :) by A+beautiful+mind · · Score: 1

      That's still too much. I'd say by a factor of 1000 at least.

      --
      It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
      Be yourself no matter what they say
    6. Re:Now THAT'S a tax write off :) by MLopat · · Score: 1

      Gigabit to Megabit is a factor of 1000... am I missing something?

    7. Re:Now THAT'S a tax write off :) by A+beautiful+mind · · Score: 1

      $20 for an extra GB of traffic? Those are insane rates...

      --
      It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
      Be yourself no matter what they say
    8. Re:Now THAT'S a tax write off :) by A+beautiful+mind · · Score: 1

      Yes, your initial calculations assumed $20 / Gbyte of traffic. That is just unrealistic. By that measure even as a home user I'd be paying thousands of dollars a month.

      --
      It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
      Be yourself no matter what they say
    9. Re:Now THAT'S a tax write off :) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Is that how "tax write off" aka business expense really work in the USA? In Australia you can only "write off" the COST of an item, not its supposed sale value. An example is if you are painter and you donate one of your paintings "worth" $1million to a tax deductable cause, you could only claim the cost of the paint and canvas (you could not even claim salary without due amount of paper). However if you did manage to sell the painting for $1M and then donated the cash, then you could claim the full $1M amount (but then of course you would also have to register a $1M revnue from the painting). This is very important because it prevents people playing around with figures.

    10. Re:Now THAT'S a tax write off :) by larry+bagina · · Score: 1

      No, it's still unreasonable. an OC-3 (155 Megabits/second) can be had for $10-20,000 a month, so it's closer to $40-80,000 a month, $1 million/year max.

      --
      Do you even lift?

      These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.

    11. Re:Now THAT'S a tax write off :) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yep, quite suicidal.

      2 years ago I had to do a study into real bandwidth costs for projected usage in the terrabye range (offsite backup).
      We got a figure that came out about $1/GB falling to $0.50c in best cases. That was 2 years ago. I'm guessing the 'real' cost has quartered since, putting it at around 0.125c/GB

      Ouside of the office I've noticed a trend amongst non-geek friends. People are much more saavy than we give them credit for. Geting stung for overbandwidth at exhorbitant prices just once is enough to radically change the habits of people.
      People seem to understand bandwidth charges intitively by direct analogy to road tolls etc, so several times I've heard "wouldn't it just be better if I mail you a DVD?". In other cases I've seen people take their laptops physically around to anothers house or office to transfer over wireless.

      I guess this is motivated by more than just money (perhpas fear/sensible security measures) since it's an open secret now that all ISPs are engaged in spying on users data.

      Whatever the reasons this cannot bode well for a healthy internet.

    12. Re:Now THAT'S a tax write off :) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      Billed bandwidth rate is usually measured at the 95% percentile. That means that your carrier takes samples throughout the day of the current TX/RX rate, and throws away the highest 5%. The 95% highest sample is what you're billed for the month. This means you can briefly burst traffic, and be billed less than if you were billed at the highest (100%) rate.

      So, 600mb/sec sustained (so that the 95% is 600) would work out to about 148TB. Even with 30% for headers, protocol overhead, etc, you're still talking ~100TB of data sent out (or into) the world.

      Usual pricing for 1mb/sec is (in the San Jose area) between $200/$150 for low volume (1-5mb) customers. For those who buy many hundreds of mb, you can get a much better deal, certainly under 100$ a meg.

      So, 600mb would cost about $600,000 a month, probably much less.

    13. Re:Now THAT'S a tax write off :) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yes you are.

      1 Gigabit = 1000 Megabits

      You said 600 Gigabits, which equals 600,000 Megabits, hence a factor of 1000.

    14. Re:Now THAT'S a tax write off :) by linj · · Score: 0

      And you have mistakenly assumed Mbit/s instead of... megabits.

      It's bandwidth, not speed.

    15. Re:Now THAT'S a tax write off :) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If you buy a commitment for several hunderds of Mbit/s the price drops to about $10 per Mbit. But ofcourse it also depends on where your traffic is going and what service level you want

    16. Re:Now THAT'S a tax write off :) by Threni · · Score: 2, Funny

      > some ISP's have started charging an additional $20 per GB

      What?! It'd be cheaper to buy the damned movies at that price. Uh..I mean...post...letters...to my grandma.....

    17. Re:Now THAT'S a tax write off :) by Sircus · · Score: 1

      The place where my server's colocated charges me EUR0.65/GByte, and I'm pretty sure that this is not all that cheap (but this is irrelevant for the amount of bandwidth I use).

      --
      PenguiNet: the (shareware) Windows SSH client
    18. Re:Now THAT'S a tax write off :) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Wow...

      For some reason, I don't exactly know how you can get price of 200$ per mbps... But mind you, you can easily buy from cogent/he.net at price near 10-15$ per mbps... You can grab some correct quality bandwidth near 20-35$ per mbps... But thoses are official sales prices... It probably cost way less to the company...

    19. Re:Now THAT'S a tax write off :) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Are you serious?

      That is totally unreasonable pricing! Here in Stockholm i can get 100 mbps broadband for 419 sek/month (less then 60us$). If i want a fixed IP-adress to set up a server, it costs 200sek/month (less then 30us$). This includes any amount of transfer.

    20. Re:Now THAT'S a tax write off :) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You're still off. Bandwidth can be had at an average of $30/mbit (sometimes higher, sometimes lower) -- if your commit level is high enough. That's $18,000/month for 600Mbit. Barely even CLOSE to the numbers people are projecting. These guys aren't going out and buying some crap-ass OC3. Nobody would be fucking with something that small at a commit level that high...

    21. Re:Now THAT'S a tax write off :) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So, 600mb would cost about $600,000 a month

      Is that millibits, or mibilibits?

  2. and now... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    ..please link to some good pr0n !!!

    1. Re:and now... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

      http://goat.cx/

  3. OOW gets STD from BSS. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Clear?

  4. You can plug that in.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ..over here. Let me show you where.

  5. Good to see Jon Stewart helping Open Source. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    I'm glad The Daily Show is jumping in to help make, uh... Open Source Licorice a reality.

    No time to read the synopsis, gotta go post...

  6. Not wishing to sound conceited but... by McFadden · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I have 1 Gigabit just for a single laptop in my apartment (in Japan). Mind you, not that I ever really get to use it. My PC can't manage more than about 5% utilization before it starts thrashing its disk and grinding to a halt. P2P takes on a whole new dimension when you can download an entire divx'd DVD in 5 minutes.

    1. Re:Not wishing to sound conceited but... by titurel · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Well, your home line is not intended to be utilized 100% all the time, and you would probably not get 1Gbit/s for very long (probably bursted in the beginning) if you and your neighbours tried to use all the bandwith..

      The donated 600Mbit/s on the other hand, that is probably a connection that is guaranteed to work under a high load 24/7.

    2. Re:Not wishing to sound conceited but... by Firehed · · Score: 2, Funny

      Can I be your roommate? If so, am I going to have to learn Japanese?

      --
      How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
    3. Re:Not wishing to sound conceited but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Your '1gbit' fiber to the house is hardly the same as the 600Mbit of bandwidth they have. In fact, I would bet that they have enterprise grade hardware to run it -- a nice Juniper to sit on the fiber and tie into someones AS, and behind that a solid cisco/foundry of some kind to provide the fast-e connectivity to the servers. If given the choice between what you have and what they have, I wouldn't hesitate for a second to get their bandwidth. Home bandwidth, no matter how fast, is just that -- home bandwidth. Nice try.

    4. Re:Not wishing to sound conceited but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

      Your wish has been granted.

      Now please go away.

    5. Re:Not wishing to sound conceited but... by McFadden · · Score: 1
      > You would probably not get 1Gbit/s for very long (probably bursted in the beginning) if you and your neighbours tried to use all the bandwith..

      They cabled the street with new fiber just for me, so I don't think many of my neighbors are using my line right now.

    6. Re:Not wishing to sound conceited but... by imsabbel · · Score: 4, Informative

      What you dont consider is that this kind of bandwith exists only virually.
      Yeah, you say thats you are the only on in your street using that fibre.
      But how many in your town? How many in your district? use that service?
      The total international interconnectivity of japan combined couldnt sustain even thousand of those kind of connections anyway. And while internal routing might be less tight, but the end result (when broadly available) will be the same as in hong-kong: your fancy ultra speed "internet" is nothing more than a fast intranet with undersized internet connection.

      --
      HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
    7. Re:Not wishing to sound conceited but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yup, because you just happen to be that special.

    8. Re:Not wishing to sound conceited but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Tokyo: I have 1Gbit FTTH to the apartment block, shared with 16 people. We each have 70Mbps VDSL to our apartments. Traffic to anything on KDDI infrastructure plus repositories such as JAIST is blistering. Speed within Japan is pretty good, too. Speed to the rest of the planet feels maybe a few times faster than the 1.5Mbps I upgraded from (and which was 200 yen more expensive :-)

      So speed is everything, but ultimately it isn't.

    9. Re:Not wishing to sound conceited but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Who cares? It's significantly better than what we have in the US, and available now. When we catch up in 10, 15 or maybe 20 years, what do you think they will have then?

    10. Re:Not wishing to sound conceited but... by AviLazar · · Score: 1

      Not really. Japan has a lot of programs that bring over US workers and they do not require ANY knowledge of Japanese. They pay you a really nice salary (in the 50k range) pay for your medical, and pay for your housing. Plus they also fly you back home a couple times a year (or any place you want to go to). Some of the jobs are manual labor jobs, but others are for teaching Japanese students how to speak English...the cool thing is, you do not have to know Japanese - the kids are given to you with some understanding of english, they just expect you to help those gets perfect their english. In addition to this - I believe they pay for your education if you take classes at the school you are teaching English.

      Not a bad deal at all..I would do it, but it is not along my career path (though it pays more then i make now, by far). Good for someone in their early 20's...either just out of college, in the teaching field, or never went to college but is capable to teach people.

      --

      I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
    11. Re:Not wishing to sound conceited but... by jpmkm · · Score: 2, Informative

      That doesn't mean your ISP has 1 gigabit/s of dedicated bandwidth in from/out to the internet just for you. Your bandwidth is still shared at some level. The 600megabits/s is not shared.

    12. Re:Not wishing to sound conceited but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      My girlfriend and I would like to spend a few years, after we're fresh out of college, in Japan. Do you happen to know of any decent places for this type of foreign worker thing? I've tried Google, but I get so many results that I thought it'd be easier to ask someone who seems somewhat familiar with the topic.

      Thanks.

    13. Re:Not wishing to sound conceited but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      sounds like somebody wants to be a bukake jockey!

    14. Re:Not wishing to sound conceited but... by McFadden · · Score: 1

      I never said that was the case. My point was about my neighbors, not my ISP and their infrastructure.

    15. Re:Not wishing to sound conceited but... by McFadden · · Score: 1

      I think you're reading too much into what I was saying. You think I'm not aware of that? I'm not a complete idiot. There's always someone available of Slashdot to point out what they think you don't know, rather than what you don't know.

  7. Slashdotting cliche by Neo-Rio-101 · · Score: 5, Funny

    They're going to need all that bandwith when they get slashdotted.

    --
    READY.
    PRINT ""+-0
    1. Re:Slashdotting cliche by Gerk · · Score: 1

      The funny thing is that they could handle it before they got this bandwidth. The slashdot effect only goes so far these days. Some setups don't even blink an eye. They host Debian's main mirrors, mozilla's main mirrors, gentoo's main mirrors ... and you think that slashdoting is going to be much more than a blip on their MRTG? heh

    2. Re:Slashdotting cliche by larry+bagina · · Score: 1

      actually, thanks to tubgirl, lemonparty, and, of course, goatse, slashdot readers have been a lot more hesitant to click those links.

      --
      Do you even lift?

      These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.

  8. Fauxpen Source Lab by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Blaah blahh bleee blaaah. Great, they have wider pipes. Where is Maintain 3.0? Or... Any other products? It's as if they want to play "Open Source" without the source. I'm personally tired of hearing about them and OSU. Go Huskies!

  9. Woohoo! by 1-dollar · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Oregon State University students can host more pr0n than ever before!

  10. OSL? WTF? BBQ? OMG! by Zephiris · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Possibly off-topic, but so many headlines recently use acronyms for things which are possibly unfamiliar, and don't provide a link on the Acronym to the homepage or an entry about whatever-it-is. Some of the stories are starting to look like the old joke, "You got a you-know-what from you-know-who, and you're supposed to take it to you-know-where by you-know when. Wink Wink. Nudge Nudge."

    --

    "A Goddess rarely smiles for she is forced by others to be an island unto herself." - Zephiris
    1. Re:OSL? WTF? BBQ? OMG! by Blakey+Rat · · Score: 1

      Heck, I just scanned all the comments, and I *still* don't know what OSL or TDS is. Usually some helpful commenter will post definitions, or at least links, but this topic is dry... I'm thinking it has something to do with downloading Linux distributions?

      --
      Comment of the year
    2. Re:OSL? WTF? BBQ? OMG! by AviLazar · · Score: 1

      You got a you-know-what from you-know-who, and you're supposed to take it to you-know-where by you-know when. Wink Wink. Nudge Nudge."

      "That's Hogwarts business"

      Personally, I think the topic poster made those acronyms up ;)

      --

      I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
    3. Re:OSL? WTF? BBQ? OMG! by burns210 · · Score: 1

      The OSL is the Open Source Lab ran out of Oregon State University. Among other things, it provides hosting to open source software. Things like Gentoo, Firefox and Linux, for example.

    4. Re:OSL? WTF? BBQ? OMG! by ant_tmwx · · Score: 1

      Agreed. Slashdot needs to start adding abbr tags for these non-basic abbreviations. Then when you hover over em you can get a general idea what they stand for.

    5. Re:OSL? WTF? BBQ? OMG! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The story was posted by ScuttleMonkey. What did you expect?

      Be grateful this one didn't include a link to his blog 'o paid advertisements.

  11. The Daily Show? by dangitman · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    It's nice to know that Jon Stewart is such a fan of bandwidth. Is he doing this so we can transmit more Bush jokes?

    --
    ... and then they built the supercollider.
  12. more evidence.. by Cannedbread · · Score: 1, Funny

    another day... another story about how amazing oregon is...

    1. Re:more evidence.. by bobcat7677 · · Score: 1

      I live in Oregon. I have lived here all my life. I have never submitted a slashdot story but I can see how others who live here might want to brag. I must say it is indeed amazing...in more ways then one.

      Amazing how beautiful it is and how we have so much diversity at our fingertips.
      Amazing how much technology, open source software, and community there is.
      Amazing how much charity Oregonians are able to come up with for various causes every year.
      Amazing how great comic books and shows like the simpsons originated here.

      I could go on and on. Does that make me concieted or just proud of where I hail from? I dunno, you figure it out.

      Is this offtopic? Probably...oh well, gotta burn some karma sometimes.

  13. What about distros? by shri · · Score: 1

    All good news, but, what happens when a new distro needs some hosting and bandwidth?

    I've provided some limited hosting to a new distro (which I dare not mention here) and the cost of dealing with several hundred ISO downloads a day is pretty expensive.

    Suggestions?

    1. Re:What about distros? by poopdeville · · Score: 2, Insightful

      BitTorrent, and volunteers. If you go this route, don't get a super fat pipe. Get something comprable to what your volunteers are using, or you'll end up serving most of the content yourself.

      --
      After all, I am strangely colored.
    2. Re:What about distros? by Llamalarity · · Score: 1

      All good news, but, what happens when a new distro needs some hosting and bandwidth?

      TDS again? Well old ones anyway.
      http://mirrors.tds.net/

  14. Do:7l by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    SLASHDOt'S

  15. Wooohooo - let use up that bandwidth by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    OSU should set up some decent bit-torrent or IRC server. Let see how many simultaneous connection that link can handle!!

    1. Re:Wooohooo - let use up that bandwidth by size1one · · Score: 1

      The Open Source Lab currently hosts some of Freenode's north american servers.

  16. MBps, I Hope! by Arch_dude · · Score: 1

    Gee, that was really cheap. Most of us use more than 600Mbit in a few seconds. OHHHH! perhaps you meant Mbps, not Mbit......

  17. Now I'm jealous... by martinultima · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    I would kill for that much bandwidth... (and we're talking "-9" and everything here, too!)

    --
    Creative misinterpretation is your friend.
  18. Time for a corrections... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    To all the posters claiming this a gift of hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions of dollars per month -- you're wrong. 600mbit is a decent commit level, and in a true datacenter, they'll be able to provide that without blinking. Depending on the quality of bandwidth (aka, who people peer with), it will cost them between $20 and $40 per mbit/sec. They don't charge by how much traffic you move. At this level, they don't care if you transfer 50GB or 500GB, it's all about how fast you move it. They would normaly bill customers at the 95%, not by overall transfer stats. That means these guys can push 600Mbit/sec inbound and outbound 24/7, and nobody will care. Of course, this is one hell of an amazing gift. It's just not nearly as high as people are claiming it is.

  19. TDS are good people by bofkentucky · · Score: 4, Informative

    They donated a fast mirror to Sun Freeware, which makes all of us Sun jockey's breathe a little easier.

    --
    09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0
  20. Ontario Soccer League? by szembek · · Score: 1

    What does the Ontario Soccer League need with all that bandwidth?

    --
    nothing
  21. Nice! by GmAz · · Score: 1

    My district just got our 20mbps line put in and this thing flies. I download at around 4 megabytes per second. Thats a 100meg file in under a minute. Very generous and hope its used well.

    --
    Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
  22. What is OSU OSL? by kbahey · · Score: 2, Informative

    I agree the summary should have more context ...

    OSU OSL is Oregon State University Open Source Labs.

    This is a project that manages infrastructure (machines, bandwidth) for many open source projects.

    Their list of projects include Debian, Drupal, Gentoo, Mozilla and others ...

    So, it is really good news, since the longevity of these projects are better (not that they were in danger or anything).

    Disclaimer: I contribute to Drupal.

    --
    2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
  23. Old News? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    OSI has been colo'd at TDS for over 6 months, this all happened last summer.

  24. hah! by Soviet+Assassin · · Score: 1

    I work for TDS Telecom as tech support in Madison, WI.. for the record, TDS Telecom SUCK as an ISP, trust me on this one. TDS Metrocom isn't nearly as bad but twice as disfunctional.

    --
    Menya zovut Shnur :P
  25. U.S. Cellulars parent company by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    can you guess where i work?