[OT] eLynah available on campus, in class

Just curious: Monday-Friday, 8:00 - 4:00 is technically time to study and attend the occasional class. So how many people have laptop access in class or the libraries to eLynah to lighten up the dull moments of the odd lecture?

eLynah counts against each person's 2GB of monthly bandwidth (it's hosted outside Cornell, right?) but that would be one heck of a lot of messaging.

I recently visited campus, and found there were WiFi public and private nets. The public net was open and provided access to external resources. So best case a student could save their monthly bandwidth by using the public access point.

Of course I am not sure where the public net is available. I found access from Uris and Olin libraries, and the Straight.

Chris

[www.cit.cornell.edu]

In short, damn near everywhere.

Actually, it wouldn't count against your monthly bandwidth. The NUBB charges are node-based, and as far as I know, if you're using Red Rover, CIT picks up the whole tab. Even if they felt like tracking users who log in, you could circumvent it by using the guest network, which is completely free. It has some limitations, but web access isn't one of them.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing; I just did a mini story for an Ed Tech magazine and found Cornell is special in two regards:

If you show up on campus, you get Wifi access. A lot of places are locked down unless you walk in to the computer center M-f, 9-5, and register, which is tough say if you're just visiting for a day or two informally.

Students were running wild in the streets with bandwidth usage (in Cornell's opinion) and a couple miscreants were really screwing things up (in Cornell's opinion). So Cornell charges about nine bucks a month for access (plus service fees that double it) and you get Napster, unlimited access inside the campus net, and 2GB per month outside. plus a surcharge of about 0.15 cents per megabyte over that. [edit addiing:] Wired not wireless currently counts against the 2GB ceiling. The upshot was that student use went from 60TB (terabytes) per month to 20TB inside of a year and faculty use fell off a bit. A lot of other campus IT people think this is the wave of the future.

So, knowing there is wifi around campus, I was tongue in cheek wondering if students with laptops occasionally checked out eLynah during the day.

This is hardly news. The NUBB system is what drove me to move to ELynah to a commercial server more than 2 years ago. I still maintain that this is the most asinine among the many screw-ups CIT has been responsible for. To deal with a miniscule subset of the users, everyone gets shafted. How does a researcher justify asking for funding for a per unit data transfer fee on a grant proposal when no other institution does it? If they want to go after just the students, by all means do. They're already nickel-and-dimed to death, and they're the reason the network is saturated. There's no reason to subject the rest of campus to it.