How will new CIT pricing effect this site?

[Cop at Lynah]

A few weeks ago I had an opportunity to learn about CIT's new pricing schedule.  I was wondering if anyone has examined the impact (cost) it might have on this site?

[jeh25]

Yes. Age has figured it out but I don't know if he wants the amount to be public knowledge just yet. I'll let him tell you when he gets back from VT/NH. Let's just say it won't be cheap.

[jy3]

what is the new pricing schedule? ::help::

[mha]

Next fiscal year (July 2003-June 2004) the plan is to begin charging not just for a connection, but for traffic above a certain volume per month. This won't include on-campus traffic, just traffic that involves the "commodity Internet connection," i.e. the link to the outside world. That's where the enormous expense is generated, and where the University feels it should be distributing the cost based on who's generating the traffic.

CIT has begun putting together "shadow billing" for this year's network traffic, so that network administrators can see what they would be paying for their usage if they were paying that way now.

[melissa\'01]

aww... good god. we are screwed. is there ANY way that the forum could be viewed as a university expense?? i know that this would be a long shot at any pt in time (esp now) but a lot of us are alumni and this is one of the few ways we stay in touch with the school. here i go - back to the same argument we've used against other recent changes. oh well. i guess it is time to put my $ where my mouth is.

by the way, has anyone by any chance seen my money? i keep losing it before i get it.

[ugarte]

Well, Age, now you know what you can use my HockeyCam donation for . . .

[nshapiro]

I think if Age has a problem, he should approach Alumni Affairs and ask them to sponser elynah.  This is really a great outreach program for the university.

[jy3]

wow, so now we go from Cornell charging students for ethernet when other colleges do not to charging per mb or kbps. This is nuts.
I am really happy to see that my degree is from a business and not an institute of higher learning ::rolleyes::

[DeltaOne81]

:: insert whole conversation on nickling and diming (and dollaring) you to death here :: :-))

good, glad we got that over with :-)

[mha]

I doubt the eLF itself is much of a bandwidth hog. One person viewing one video clip probably takes up more bandwidth than everyone reading all the messages on the Forum all day.

[mha]

Actually, what's nuts has been the way the network bandwidth has been abused by some. The cost of providing the steadily increasing connection to the Internet is astronomical, and the lion's share of the bandwidth is used by a tiny portion of the population. File sharing is one big culprit, but it's not the only one.

As has been observed in other threads, nothing is free. Given a choice between asking everyone to pay a flat rate, and asking departments to pay based on how much of the bandwidth they use, Cornell is leaning towards getting the people using the most to pay for it.

Cornell's providers don't charge it by the gigabyte, but the University DOES keep having to add more capacity to its internal network, and add more bandwidth to its external connectionsm, and that's all very expensive.

Should someone who's just using the Internet connection to browse text-only scientific web sites have to pay as much for his Internet connection as someone who's listening to a high-bandwidth Internet radio station all day every day? Or should that first user have to pay the same rate as a department server that offers video clips to everyone in the world?

[jy3]

mark, i know what u are saying. I guess if they have to charge, doing it this way makes the most sense.

[Beeeej]

Sorry, it was beginning to get to me.  Clearly I need a vacation.  ::rolleyes::

Beeeej

[upperdeck]

this has little to do with with increasing costs.  this is a way for the university to push the cost of an entire depertment out to other places. the shadow bills show that several departments are going to have a hard time keeping web sites going. remember if you own a site that gets only a few hits a year but for some reason fall under an attack you will pay dearly... its a very shorted cited strategy and everyone knows it.   have any idea what it will cost the university to run the main web site with the video camera?   this stupid new policy will punish those that create the best use of the internet... its not like the network boys cant tell whats going on.  just remember dont leave auto update things on anymore. Norton/W2k and such that download for you will cost you money...

[CowbellGuy]

Mark H. Anbinder wrote:

Actually, what's nuts has been the way the network bandwidth has been abused by some. The cost of providing the steadily increasing connection to the Internet is astronomical, and the lion's share of the bandwidth is used by a tiny portion of the population. File sharing is one big culprit, but it's not the only one.

Precisely. 80% of the commodity bandwidth usage comes from ResNet, and the vast majority of that is peer-to-peer file sharing, and of that, about 85% is outgoing. So naturally the solution is to screw everybody over. To say nothing about how crappy the performance of the commodity internet has been lately. Just another bonehead Cornell move.

As for eLF, you'd be very surprised at the amount of data it transfers, considering it's primarily text. Over a million requests in the last week, incidentally. And more like watching 50 clips a day, Mark. However, it's not enough to put the site in jeopardy. Ditto for the database. The problems would have been the eLynah video clips and hockeycam, but since it doesn't appear either of those will be getting much action, I guess they took care of themselves.