Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

The Luxury of a Bottomless Bucket of Bandwidth For Georgia Schools

Posted by Soulskill on from the 4k-cat-videos-for-all-students dept.

Lemeowski writes: The IT departments at all the University System of Georgia institutions have a luxury that most CIOs could only dream of — access to about 2,800 miles of free fiber and a private cloud that they an always count on. The private cloud configuration allows the perk of not focusing on bandwith. "Our local CIOs even take some pleasure in telling telecom company representatives, 'If you can beat free, then I'm willing to listen.' That tends to shut down most conversations,"writes USG CIO Curt Carver, who explains how the technology is now becoming an educational equalizer across the state. In 2015, Georgia school districts are expected to have a 33-fold increase in bandwdith available to them through the program. "This will help to flatten the state. No more haves or have-nots in terms of bandwidth going into the school districts."

79 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. Free to who? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Surely it's not free to the taxpayers.

    1. Re:Free to who? by blackomegax · · Score: 2

      You forget, tuition in the US is absurd and more than enough to cover the infrastructure and land use.

    2. Re:Free to who? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Depends on the school/university, as some depend entirely on tuition and run like a business, others have a large endowment, and some get most of their money from grants and research. A lot of the places that fall into the latter two categories will state a large tuition rate, but then give need based grants to students to cover anything beyond what is expected from their family (using typically a standard EFC formula). The result is only a small portion pays full tuition, and increases in tuition only impact the richest students. That typically applies mostly to private universities, but public universities in some states also are required to give free tuition (or are covered from state budget) to students who meet certain academic requirements.

    3. Re:Free to who? by clovis · · Score: 2

      Surely it's not free to the taxpayers.

      True, but the point is that it's free to the end point user, who would have nothing otherwise.
      Instead of having each of the 6,000 plus schools and colleges run their own network department, each rent bandwidth, and each run a budget item for it, the University System of Georgia pays for it and maintains it. In other words, just like any large corporation would do. Schools in rural areas an't get high-speed bandwidth through the commercial carriers for anything affordable, and in some rural areas you can't get it at all. And, once the capital cost of laying the fiber and equipment is done, then it costs a fraction of what the monthly rent from ISPs would be.

    4. Re:Free to who? by blackomegax · · Score: 1

      In GA, tuition is subsidized by the state lottery (ironic little idiot tax, but NOT in any way a forced/theft tax system like regular taxes), and the University System of Georgia is the state gov agency that runs public state schools (there might be a private one or two, but they don't account for the bulk of the budget that USG gets). the USG certainly does get proper tax money, but it's a minor source of income compared to actual tuition and such. Source / used to work at a GA state uni

    5. Re:Free to who? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I'm actually involved in building out the fiber and connectivity to more than half of these schools. Posting anonymously because I'm probably under some NDA that the salesjerks haven't shared with me. I'm not sure who is funding it but Peachnet is the customer of record, and they're farming this out to a large Telco, who will then turn around and sub-contract out some of the schools to other telcos where they do not have fiber. I expect the funding is a combination of state and federal but I don't know the details. The bandwidth requested really is pretty stunning. In a lot of towns the local high school is going to have more bandwidth available to it than the local ISP head-end/CO. I believe the grand total roll-up of bandwidth being delivered to the core routers in Atlanta will be something north of 300gbps, if I remember correctly.

      In any case though, I think this is actually a good approach because Peachnet is basically getting a bulk discount by ordering all this as one large system, rather than hundreds of individual large circuits.

  2. So who's taxes are paying for this? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    The article doesn't mention anything about how this "impressive" infrastructure is maintained.

    Do they have a bunch of tinker fairies that live in Georgia that we don't know about???

    1. Re:So who's taxes are paying for this? by everett · · Score: 2

      I imagine it's paid for by the "technology use fees" paid by every student of the USG.

      --
      Sig withheld to protect the innocent.
    2. Re:So who's taxes are paying for this? by sandytaru · · Score: 2

      'Twas $75 a year the last time I was a student in 2013. Good to know my money went to something awesome.

      --
      Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
    3. Re:So who's taxes are paying for this? by sjames · · Score: 1

      The same people who would be paying even more to get less capability for one-off connections for their county schools. Bandwidth gets cheap fast when you can buy large amounts.

  3. Bandwidth is not a finite resource by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    And I wish people would stop talking about as such its unlimited everything is run by peering agreements were the backbone providers just exchange traffic for free. The only charge is the last mile of infrastructure and theres no reason that has to be expensive either.

  4. Re:For what? Nobody can download that much pron... by halivar · · Score: 1

    UGA has 15,000 male college students. I think they can use it.

  5. Re:For what? Nobody can download that much pron... by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · · Score: 1

    "And how are the students using their bottomless bandwidth?"

    (Looks at screens) " Too much bottomless! Too much bottomless!"

    --
    (-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
  6. Re:For what? Nobody can download that much pron... by quonsar · · Score: 1

    barnyard porn!

    --

    Sacred cows make the best burgers.

  7. Free Beating by Mr+D+from+63 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    'If you can beat free, then I'm willing to listen.'

    Well, someone should tell them its not free, its just that they don't get the bill. Its not clear from the article what the actual cost is.

    1. Re:Free Beating by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 1

      Even if we ignore the sunk cost of the already laid fiber, it still has to managed, and that ain't free.

    2. Re:Free Beating by FlyHelicopters · · Score: 1

      Sorry, I thought it was free because they owned the fiber in the ground.
      Maybe I'm wrong.

      And was the fiber put there by magic fairies?

      Is it maintained by magic fairies?

    3. Re:Free Beating by RavenLrD20k · · Score: 1

      The fiber is paid for and managed/maintained by the Georgia Lottery and the "Technology Use Fees" which are in turn paid for by compulsive gamblers and Students attending University System of Georgia schools, respectively. Very little of this technology, if any of it, is paid for by taxpayers directly. Though, what I find funny is that while the high technology is provided for, teachers in public and private schools have to be the ones to purchase the Kleenex, pencils, paper, etc for the students to use during the year out of their own pockets.

    4. Re:Free Beating by hawguy · · Score: 1

      Even if we ignore the sunk cost of the already laid fiber, it still has to managed, and that ain't free.

      Every building on their campus also has a huge sunk cost and operational costs, but we don't expect them to rent office space rather than manage their own buildings on their own campus. Why should critical infrastructure like their network be any different?

      I'd be surprised if the fiber network maintenance is a huge portion of their campus network budget. I managed a small corporate campus network (5 interconnected buildings, the longest run was around a kilometer), and the fiber network cost nothing to maintain over the 5 years I was there. They cheaped out when they did the build out by only pulling 2 pair between some of the buildings, when we needed more bandwidth between a couple buildings, rather than pull more fiber, we used a passive optical multiplexer that gave us 8 (?) channels over a single pair.

      We did have a fiber cut to an outlying building once due to a landscaping crew's backhoe, they paid the cost to have a contractor come in and resplice the fiber, as well as the cost to rent point-to-point wireless gear to get the network up long enough for the fix - we had the point to point network up within 4 hours of the fiber cut. Most of the buildings were on a ring, so a single fiber cut wouldn't result in an outage.

      Maintaining the copper infrastructure took much more money than the fiber. Of course, it had many more ports, and a lot more switches, we had a relative few core switches that touched the fiber network and these were all heavily built enterprise switches with full redundancy and hot swappable components so we could fix a hardware problem without downtime, but we over 500 switches that touched the copper network.

    5. Re:Free Beating by NatasRevol · · Score: 1

      It's still at least an order of magnitude cheaper than renting it from a fiber provider.

      --
      There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
    6. Re:Free Beating by neoritter · · Score: 1

      And what happens if there's a drop in lottery spending?

    7. Re:Free Beating by clovis · · Score: 1

      'If you can beat free, then I'm willing to listen.'

      Well, someone should tell them its not free, its just that they don't get the bill. Its not clear from the article what the actual cost is.

      sigh.
      It should be obvious to anyone that read the article that what he meant was free at the endpoint - free to the school that receives the bandwidth.

      How can I explain it?
      My next door neighbor was working in his garden, and I told him him could take a break and offered him a beer.
      I handed him a beer over the fence. He did not give me any money.
      He got a free beer.
      I know that I had to earn the money to buy the beer,
      He got a free beer because he didn't give me any money.
      I know that the brewery had to purchase the materials and plant to brew the beer and buy bottles.
      But he got a free beer because he didn't have to pay for any of that.
      It was a free beer.
      That beer was transported on public roads that had been paid for with taxes, and my neighbor pays taxes. but there was no cost to my neighbor for transporting that beer.
      It was a still free beer to him.

      He got a free beer.

      If the word "free" has any meaning at all, then somebody gets something they did not have to give extra money for.
      In this case, it's free bandwidth to schools.

      If you want to argue that "the money could have been used to buy books instead", I'll tell you that the cost of that beer could have been used to give my neighbor a book. But nonetheless he still got a beer. And it was free.

    8. Re:Free Beating by RavenLrD20k · · Score: 1

      PowerBall
      Mega Millions
      Fantasy 5
      Georgia Five
      Cash4
      Cash3
      Keno
      All Or Nothing
      Numerous Scratch offs
      Giant Redneck / Poor / Elderly Population / Hopeful Middle-Aged
      Daily media of all sorts decrying that all these proceeds will go straight to the HOPE Scholarship program

      I don't think this will be a problem in the foreseeable future. The beast must be fed; the beast knows how to get its food.

    9. Re:Free Beating by sjames · · Score: 1

      It was put there by people voluntarily playing the lottery.

    10. Re:Free Beating by Mr+D+from+63 · · Score: 1

      You don't get it. If you gave him that beer from the community fund, that he himself was contributing to, he didn't get a free beer and might wonder why you were using the community chess to give him a beer, or if that was the wisest use of that money. If the state educational system is funding it, just because a school doesn't see the bill doesn't mean its free. Or, in your case, everything for the school is free because they really aren't paying for anything, they are just workers at the schools.

      My example is a lot shorter as well!

    11. Re:Free Beating by FlyHelicopters · · Score: 1

      Ahh, but it wasn't... unless they went out and did the work themselves.

      Those tickets made money, and someone decided to spend that money on this fiber.

      Which is fine, but money is fungible, it can be used for almost anything, so that money also could have been used to build roads, or reduce taxes.

      So the fiber wasn't free.

    12. Re:Free Beating by sjames · · Score: 1

      Actually, the law that authorized the Ga Lottery specifies that it must be spent for education and that it must be in addition to funds allocated from the general budget. It was the only way to overcome opposition.

    13. Re:Free Beating by unixisc · · Score: 1

      'If you can beat free, then I'm willing to listen.'

      Well, someone should tell them its not free, its just that they don't get the bill. Its not clear from the article what the actual cost is.

      But that's the point - they don't get the bill. Would it be the same w/ the telecom guys who approach him?

    14. Re:Free Beating by FlyHelicopters · · Score: 1

      Sure, until the general budget gets changed... :)

      Texas did the same thing over a decade ago, if you compare the pre and post edu budgets, you'll see the same thing happened...

      Besides, no one says it has to be spent on fiber for the schools, it could be spent on teachers to reduce the student teacher ratio...

      So the fiber still isn't free. :)

    15. Re:Free Beating by clovis · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You don't get it. If you gave him that beer from the community fund, that he himself was contributing to, he didn't get a free beer and might wonder why you were using the community chess to give him a beer, or if that was the wisest use of that money. If the state educational system is funding it, just because a school doesn't see the bill doesn't mean its free. Or, in your case, everything for the school is free because they really aren't paying for anything, they are just workers at the schools. My example is a lot shorter as well!

      It drive me nuts when someone makes the argument that something is not free because somebody paid for it somewhere.
      It's free to the person who got it and did not pay for it, otherwise the word "free" has no meaning.

      Sure, Peachnet is funded ultimately by the State of Georgia taxes and lottery players, and all money ultimately comes from the labor of the proletariat or something like that. The thing is that various entities have their own budgets, whether it's my bank account, schools, or the fire department. And this is not in the budgets of the school systems that are receiving the service.

      The fiber rollout to these schools is happening outside their budgets - it's not an item to them.
      Nor can they choose to spend the money on something else that they might think is a better use because they never see any money.

      The thing is that many, if not most of the schools that are getting the fiber have no money for such things because they have little tax base.
      There are 159 counties in Ga, and of those about half have less than 25,000 population. 30 counties have less than 10,000 people. Their tax base is not enough to fund getting fiber, network infrastructure, and support run to anywhere especially for the few students they have. Their contribution to the tax base is a fraction of what they get back.

      If the state did not provide the fiber at no cost to them, those schools would have no fiber.
      It is irrelevant that there may have been a wiser use of the money because they never had the money.


      If you asked me if it was free to the people of the State of Georgia, then no it isn't. The money came out of our pockets.
      But it's free to the school systems.

    16. Re:Free Beating by sjames · · Score: 1

      Nothing whatsoever is free by your standards. Absolutely nothing. Since that would render the word meaningless, you might want to adjust your definition.

      It is free for the schools and free from the taxpayers in the sense that neither the schools or the taxpayers had to pay for it.

      It is free in the sense that all of the money spent on it was freely given.

    17. Re:Free Beating by FlyHelicopters · · Score: 1

      It isn't free in that the money could have been used to lower my taxes.

      Thus it isn't free at all.

      The sunlight shining on all of us is free. The air around us is free. The dirt we're standing on is free.

      Your thoughts are free, your love for your family is free.

      Fiber optic cables are anything but free.

      ---

      Note: I'm not even suggesting this is a BAD way to spend money, perhaps it is a good thing. I'm simply pointing out that it did cost money and it wasn't free, the school just didn't write a check for it, but someone did, and that money came out of the economy from somewhere.

    18. Re:Free Beating by sjames · · Score: 1

      That sun shining on you could have been caught by a solar panel. The air you're breathing could have been my endless sink for toxic gasses. You could be doing productive work rather than having a family. The dirt under your feet could be the site of a new pay parking garage. Etc. Etc. Etc.

      Shouldn't you be thinking about work?

    19. Re:Free Beating by FlyHelicopters · · Score: 1

      Now you're just being obtuse... :)

    20. Re:Free Beating by sjames · · Score: 1

      Anything worth doing is worth overdoing! :).

    21. Re:Free Beating by neoritter · · Score: 1

      Albeit unlikely, the question is still valid. We're not talking a huge drop. But enough that the spending is outpacing the revenue, etc. The spending on this network would feasibly grow overtime, that means the revenues from the lottery need to grow as much as well over time. So even a drop in growth.

    22. Re:Free Beating by RavenLrD20k · · Score: 1

      One can hope that the trend would be gradual enough that the state could come up with an alternate source or revenue for education before a crisis (not holding my breath on that one). That said at the risk of getting flamed:

      This is Georgia we're talking about. Home of Redneck Games, Honey Boo Boo (Christ I used to live not 5 minutes from the neighborhood she moved to), and the general mentality among the up-and-coming youth that Construction or other forms of manual labor is the best employer (still). Yeah, in larger metros like Atlanta, Athens, and less so in Savannah, you have some big growth in technical and commercial industry; but if you get out into more suburban areas (Albany, Brunswick, Macon, Waycross) this tech mentality drops off a cliff, though there's still a baseline that the office job allows for a certain level of convenience. If you go even further out into rural Georgia... tech? What's that? Well...except for the EMC situation we have which gave the "hicks" 2 benefits: Lots and lots of manual labor that they love, and fast broadband internet to enjoy in the downtime. You can go even farther out into the Georgia boonies and things will get survivalist surreal REAL quick. These are the areas where water is from wells, sewer is the outhouse, power is from waterwheels or windmills...and that's about it. Good luck even getting Phone service. There are some areas out in the boonies of Georgia that make "Deliverance" look like a light-hearted bedtime story.

      Somewhat ironically, in the areas of rural (not boony) Georgia that the Cable/DSL companies have written off, the local regional Electric Membership Co-Ops have taken over the installation of Fiber to the Home and started feeding 10mbps + broadband to the homes bundled with Electric, Television, and Phone service. This is probably what scared the incumbent providers into upping the service level of their offerings in their territories the most: While EMC's aren't known for their great electrical service rates, the other services in the bundle were costing customers a fraction of what the cable providers were, for what amounted to twice as much bandwidth or more, and 600+ channels (all HD) for the price of what cable was providing for their 2nd lowest tier (abt 70 SDTV channels).

  8. They've finally built a 100% uptime cloud? by hawguy · · Score: 1

    a private cloud that they an always count on

    I hope they share this cloud technology with the rest of the world, so we can all have access to a cloud we can count on. This sounds almost too good to be true, but if the CIO said it, it must be true!

    I'd like to see some interviews from the departmental IT staff that use this always available, unlimited use bandwidth and cloud.

    1. Re:They've finally built a 100% uptime cloud? by sandytaru · · Score: 1

      I would like to see that too. They're across the street from my office, funny enough. I wonder if I go knock on the door and ask, if anyone would talk to me?

      Now if they could just make this service available to alumni, I'd be set. Heck, I'd pay them. My house isn't that far from campus, and their service clearly can't be any worse than AT&T or Charter.

      --
      Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
    2. Re:They've finally built a 100% uptime cloud? by cryptolemur · · Score: 1

      I believe it does not mean it's uptime and accessibility is 99.99999% (or better) but that since it's not private third party shenanigan, it can't go bankrupt and disappear overnight. Or be closed by FBI without warning.

  9. Free Market Solution? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    This doesn't seem like a good Free Market solution. The state of Georgia could save a lot of money by having private enterprises, with expertise in these areas, sell bandwidth to individual schools. It's just a short move from this, to the communism that is municipal broadband.

    1. Re:Free Market Solution? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Free Market doesn't always mean less costly. AT&T screwed over the people of Wisconsin writing a bill for the politicians to put in place that made it so they could eliminate this exact type of efficiency that Georgia is doing. Not exactly free market when political contributions are involved.

  10. Re:For what? Nobody can download that much pron... by gstoddart · · Score: 1

    Given the body of your post ... and the content of your sig ... the mind reels.

    Not a link I'll be clicking.

    --
    Lost at C:>. Found at C.
  11. GFD by sootman · · Score: 4, Funny

    I only recently finished convincing all my non-technie friends that the Internet is not a series of tubes; now I have to start explaining to them that bandwidth does not actually come in buckets. Do you realize how many pounds of email I'll have to write about this? Fuck it, I quit.

    --
    Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
    1. Re:GFD by LWATCDR · · Score: 1

      What is the bandwidth of a bucket of microSD cards on the back of a motorcycle?

      --
      See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
    2. Re:GFD by RavenLrD20k · · Score: 1

      Making certain assumptions and estimations about the size of the microSD (presuming 64GB), the number of microSD cards that could fit on the face of an average sized playing card (estimating a 10 by 7 grid of them), and basing the volume of playing cards WolframAlpha states can fit in a 5 gallon bucket (about 12k)... an estimation of the bandwidth is ~51.5 PB * speed/distance. So the bandwidth to go from one town to the next at the normal highway speed limit here is roughly 120 PB / hour or 34 TB/s

    3. Re:GFD by LWATCDR · · Score: 1

      If we could just solve the latency problem it could be a real winner.

      --
      See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
    4. Re:GFD by neminem · · Score: 1

      Right, it doesn't *come* in buckets... that's just where it goes , duh.

  12. In other words, it's a Utility. by gurps_npc · · Score: 5, Insightful
    A state run one at that.

    And proves pretty well, that the government can and does do things better than private corporations.

    The key is that the government works best when the service/commodity in questions needs to go to everyone and does not truly have inherent differences in quality, besides quantity.

    The internet fits this bill, just like water, electricity, and roads.

    --
    excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
    1. Re:In other words, it's a Utility. by sandytaru · · Score: 1

      Correct, all USG schools have a per semester technology fee. Sounds like they actually found a better use for it than new iPads for the mac labs, at least.

      --
      Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
    2. Re:In other words, it's a Utility. by by+(1706743) · · Score: 2

      How much do you pay for your electricity? Surely the IRS is getting their grubby hands on every joule there as well? Is it exorbitantly expensive?

      Chances are it's about the same price you pay for gasoline, per unit usable energy.

    3. Re:In other words, it's a Utility. by khallow · · Score: 1

      And proves pretty well, that the government can and does do things better than private corporations.

      Ok, what is being done better here?

    4. Re:In other words, it's a Utility. by Livius · · Score: 1

      The internet fits this bill, just like water, electricity, and roads.

      That explains why poor quality roads don't exist!

    5. Re:In other words, it's a Utility. by RavenLrD20k · · Score: 1

      Also, considering that the Georgia Lottery profits goes to the HOPE Scholarship program that pays for the tuition of eligible students, and a good portion of Georgia Resident students are eligible providing a minimum performance level, as well as any surplus in the program that doesn't go into making a bigger pot is automatically deferred to projects such as this, means that at least a very sizable portion of this infrastructure has been paid for by the troves of compulsive gamblers here waiting to hit "the big payout." Thank you compulsive gamblers! Your vice has paved the way for better communications infrastructure for our state! So much so that Cox Communications just laid out a bandwidth boost to all its customers in this college town (if not throughout its Georgia Service Area) to try to compete (I now get 100mbits for the price I was paying for 25mbits last month).

    6. Re:In other words, it's a Utility. by Shatrat · · Score: 1

      Not really. The state just sub-contracts all this out to AT&T today, although they opened the bidding up to other carriers for the 2015 upgrade discussed in the article.

      --
      09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
    7. Re:In other words, it's a Utility. by steelfood · · Score: 1

      Actually, funny thing: water and power aren't always public. In fact, they're usually private, only heavily regulated.

      Roads are mostly public, but some states were so cash-strapped they actually sold sections of road to private entities.

      There are a lot of things that should be public, those namely being infrastructure (roads, power, communications) and services (police, fire, medicine). The alluring thing about private is that it moves faster and usually is more efficient when building out the service or infrastructure. But when that service or infrastructure becomes critical, it then becomes incredibly inefficient. So at some point, such services and infrastructure should be taken over by government. But that can't happen or it would disincentivize the buildout entirely, so they're heavily regulated instead.

      But the country is trending towards the opposite, where everything's becoming private (sometimes again), from prisons to services to infrastructure. That is a result of cronyism and a rotten political system. It's the late 1800's, early 1900's all over again. "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

      --
      "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
    8. Re:In other words, it's a Utility. by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      I would like to see why you think it's run well (really).

      The article has sentences like this, " It’s essentially a bottomless bucket, as long as it's used efficiently and in a cost-effective manner." So which is it, a bottomless bucket, or something that must be used efficiently? Which is it, free, or something that you have to worry about using cost-effectively? The article doesn't explain, they say they have thousands of miles of fiber, then say it's free (which of course it's not, even if the author thinks it is).

      I'd be happy even knowing where they got the fiber....is it dark fiber they picked up from the .bomb era? Is it a government program to constantly improve infrastructure? That would be interesting, but still we don't know.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    9. Re:In other words, it's a Utility. by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      Lottery....a tax on the poor and math-incompetent.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    10. Re:In other words, it's a Utility. by Tetetrasaurus · · Score: 1

      What's your link speed? ping? Do you have a bandwidth cap? What's your monthly rate for internet? What's your uptime%? How's your customer service? This system beats any internet service anyone has inside the USA, save for other municipalities who have also made their own ISPs.

    11. Re:In other words, it's a Utility. by whit3 · · Score: 1

      I would like to see why you think it's run well (really).

      The article has sentences like this, " Itâ(TM)s essentially a bottomless bucket, as long as it's used efficiently and in a cost-effective manner." So which is it, a bottomless bucket, or something that must be used efficiently? Which is it, free, or something that you have to worry about...

      The resource is 'free' only in the sense that it isn't encumbered by administrators outside
      the state educational system. The indication that it's run well is the claim that the network
      has been nearly trouble-free (i.e. that the telco horror-story of $100 per month per user
      of 'costs' is a fantasy).

      When public servants run a wide-area network, they provide a wide open window
      to view the cost and performance tradeoffs. It's worth looking out that window and
      noting the landscape. For-profit service providers only show you billboards... and bills.

    12. Re:In other words, it's a Utility. by khallow · · Score: 1

      What's your link speed? ping? Do you have a bandwidth cap? What's your monthly rate for internet? What's your uptime%? How's your customer service? This system beats any internet service anyone has inside the USA, save for other municipalities who have also made their own ISPs.

      "Beats" in what way? I notice several obvious flaws with your argument: no consideration of cost, no consideration of peculiar economics of scale of a considerable university system, and no basis of comparison.

    13. Re:In other words, it's a Utility. by khallow · · Score: 1

      Peachnet's budget for 2014 was 25 million to support 80 Colleges and Universities plus the 6,000 K-12 schools. Do you know anything about corporate IT budgets?

      Peachnet is not an IT department. Those colleges and schools still need to provide their own IT. And if any of those parties fail to provide adequate IT support, it's no skin off their teeth.

    14. Re:In other words, it's a Utility. by Tetetrasaurus · · Score: 1

      Nice dodge. What you are trying to imply is that somehow this costs a lot more than say Comcast does. It doesn't. And you get far better service in every single way as I said, with many unique features not even offered by the big ISPs. If you don't think there is a basis for comparison then you don't understand networking in general, and you'd only say that anyway because you know in a comparison that the Georgia system wins hands down, as would any municipal ISP.

    15. Re:In other words, it's a Utility. by khallow · · Score: 1

      Comcast doesn't serve this sort of market. Look for a backbone provider like AT&T or MCI. And you have yet to address even one of my observations.

    16. Re:In other words, it's a Utility. by Tetetrasaurus · · Score: 1

      "And you have yet to address even one of my observations." You made no observations other than "you can't compare them" when you can easily, but you have completely ignored my observations twice now.

      I notice you do this a lot, ignore what people are saying that is very relevant, while claiming the same is being done to you when it's not. It's not conducive to good dialogue.

    17. Re:In other words, it's a Utility. by khallow · · Score: 1

      I notice you do this a lot, ignore what people are saying that is very relevant,

      That's because people make a lot of irrelevant observations. I explain below why your post fell into that unfortunate category.

      but you have completely ignored my observations twice now.

      Comcast serves a different sort of market. And there are private services which are far better fits for a comparison.

      Sure, it's similar enough to make a misleading comparison, but it's a bit like comparing a fancy restaurant to a fast food restaurant. Which is better depends on how you weight their respective services, quality, cost, speed of service, etc.

      But I think everyone would agree that I'm not making a fair comparison, if I claim that no one can provide as fine a meal as my fancy restaurant merely because the fast food choice doesn't compare. "My restaurant is better than McDonald's therefore it's the best in the world." In fact, I doubt anyone would find that claim even remotely useful to determine just how good my food is.

      Comcast provides cheap combination cable TV/internet services to residences and businesses. It's not in the business of providing high bandwidth backbone services like what Peachnet provides. So you claim that because Peachnet is superior to Comcast, then it's superior to any private network solution out there in the world - while ignoring actual private services that actually do the sort of thing that Peachnet does far better than Comcast could. That just isn't saying anything useful or interesting. Hence, this is why your observation is irrelevant.

      Now, why should I pay lip service to an argument that doesn't go anywhere? How does that help anyone?

  13. Re:For what? Nobody can download that much pron... by halivar · · Score: 1

    As one female acquaintance said of the dating scene at GA Tech: "The odds are good... but the goods are odd."

  14. And the squirrels .. by clovis · · Score: 1

    From the article:
    "Squirrels in Georgia like their fiber, there are always squirrels chewing on fiber lines somewhere, "

    Thank you slashdot for continuing to warn society about the ever present squirrel menace: http://hardware.slashdot.org/s... http://beta.slashdot.org/submi... https://www.google.com/#q=slas...

    1. Re:And the squirrels .. by GoddersUK · · Score: 1

      I saw this. What kind of crazy squirrels does America have that can digest glass? Seriously, I can't imagine it does their insides any good!

      *insert high fibre diet joke here*

  15. Re:For what? Nobody can download that much pron... by sandytaru · · Score: 1

    Georgia Tech is part of the USG system, so they're already included in this grouping if I understand TFA correctly.

    --
    Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
  16. Re:For what? Nobody can download that much pron... by by+(1706743) · · Score: 1

    Sustained, sure -- but if I'm sending a large file, backing up remotely, etc., then unless it's faster than my disk, it can be improved.

    At my university we have (legitimate) 100Mbps connections -- for surfing the web, sure, it doesn't much matter. But for reasonably large files (disk images, backups, etc.), it's still a bottleneck.

  17. Jobs for some by Terry95 · · Score: 1

    I wonder how many jobs the state lost for this communist nirvana. Not so much the telecom jobs, because any state endeavor is going to employ 4 useless people to do the job of one productive individual. But all that infrastructure comes with a great big government check - that is inevitably written against a great big tax. Taxes are the unseen killer in any economy.

    It is also worth calling out the studies coming out showing, remarkably, that you cannot replace Teaching with Technology. No rational person would argue for a return to ink and quills. But technology for technology's sake is no better. Comprehensive teacher evaluations and the ability to easily and cheaply fire bad teachers would be infinitely more beneficial to students than sub second ping times.

    1. Re:Jobs for some by Knightman · · Score: 1

      Before spouting nonsense on the internet, maybe you should inform yourself on how it was and is funded since your post makes you sound like a commie-hating loon that doesn't trust the guberment.

      --
      --- Reality doesn't care about your opinions, it happens anyway and if you are in the way you'll get squished.
  18. cio cio cio... by swell · · Score: 1

    I'm happy for all those CIOs with all that bandwidth. Deliriously happy. But wait, has there ever been a CIO who didn't have lots of bandwidth compared to average people?

    Tell me about the real people who benefit from this. The college students, high school students, government employees, etc. Oh, that's for the future? So why are we reading this on slashdot?

    --
    ...omphaloskepsis often...
    1. Re:cio cio cio... by RavenLrD20k · · Score: 1

      Bah. Cynical. I'm benefitting directly from this now, and I am no where's near the level of a CIO. The community at large here benefits in this college town because the bandwidth demands of the local colleges (3 within this town alone; 2 of which are part of the USG; and I'm not even including the campuses/offices for the local presence of Virginia Tech and University of Phoenix) as well as the demands of local students to be able to communicate large amounts of audio/video data (legitimate video conferencing, telephony, and video tutorial streaming for classes; not even accounting for frivolous use which pushes the demand even higher) has forced the local cable company (Cox Communications) to quadruple EVERYONE'S bandwidth allotment without raising rates (at least they haven't yet and we're going on the second month since the service upgrade). The base tier was getting advertised 6mb/s average with max speed rates roughly 12mb/s at low demand times. The base has been upgraded to 25mb/s advertised with 40-50mb/s burst/low demand. My own tier was the second best I could get for residential service: 25mb/s advertised, but because I live in an area where there's not many other people that use this tier, my average speed was in the neighborhood of 40-60mb/s (tested based on time it took to download a 16GB garbage file stored on a remote server owned and controlled by myself). After the upgrade my advertised has jumped to 100mb/s, though my average bandwidth using the same testing method above is only around 110-125mb/s. Now all they have to do is raise the soft cap and I can truly say that for a cable company they're pretty decent, at least compared to the horror stories from Comcast.

      And if you want to hear about the students who benefit? If they use the campus network, or connect to it through their dorm connection, they are already benefiting from all the bandwidth available to the college... and it's only growing.

      Oh, and all this bandwidth growth hasn't been paid for from the tax pool (income tax or sales tax). It's been paid for by Compulsive Gamblers and Students.

  19. We'll have the results by backslashdot · · Score: 1

    We'll know this is working and improving education when we see GA become a blue state.

  20. Free? by Riplakish · · Score: 1

    I couldn't find anything in the article where it explained where the magic fairies created the network out of dreams and wishes. Someone had to pay for the "2,800 miles of free fiber" because it couldn't have been donated all of those responsible, well-meaning corporations out there. Too many government officials confuse free with "didn't come out of our budget".

  21. Re:For what? Nobody can download that much pron... by unixisc · · Score: 1

    Is this an Internet2 connection?

  22. Really not news... by troutdun · · Score: 1

    This is good for the State of GA, but overall is not a paradigm shift...many states have been running Research and Education networks for years. NCREN (MCNC.org) has been offering a similar model for years to UNC system schools and private colleges and universities. It's now been expanded (through grants and foundation funding) to a footprint that touches virtually all K12 as well. It's a combination of owned fiber, IRU's (and some ISP connections to some K12 sites). The UNC institutions have a minimum of 1 gig uplinks for small schools and multiple 10 gigs for the research extensive institutions. This allows unlimited traffic on-net, including private cloud services. NCREN peers with major traffic destinations (like Google) and with major area ISP's like Time Warner to keep local traffic local, minimize commodity Internet bandwidth and keep routing links short. NCREN hosts nodes from major CDN's like Akamai for the same reasons. NCREN has connections to Internet2 and enormous pipes to various commodity Internet providers. Connecting institutions pay a fee based on the pipe size at the campus demarc, and on the amount of commodity Internet bandwidth they want to offer. It allows the community to create the right incentive framework for private clouds and the use of public clouds like Google. It's a good model, and it's good that Georgia has moved in this direction.