Quote:
Originally posted by Vanquish
Arch13 I dont fully agree with you that he does not pay the university enough. I agree with p2p sharing, as they can eat up a lot of bandwidth, but I mean hes paying a premium to stay in a small dorm room, I am SURE that the university has there asses covered for costs from the tuition and the room & board. I mean what kind of business people would they be if they didn't make money off there students.
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P2P is the beast that all schools hate. From a liability and monotary perspective it's to dangerous to deal with.
The average cost of an OC3 is enormus for the line to simply continue to operate, nevermind that when you get to that size pipe your charged by the gig. there is no such thing as unlimited download on industrial connections like this. Lines like that are called level3 connections and run about 10,000 a month plus 15.00 a gig. The average student will eat about 1/2 a gig in a month from AIM, graphical web browsing, and email with attatchments. That means that a school of moderate size (~4000) will spend 40,000 a month on their connection.
Dorms are where a school usually bleeds money made up from other sources as they provide unlimited utilities such as heat, water, and local phone service. Dorms also need to be rehabed about every 5 years for local code and livibility concerns as well. I know this because i happen to have sat on a colleges board of directors in the past as a student consultant.
You then have to add in the data the schools deal in every day on that pipeline for such things as student files, their web page, and student email as well as any data from research and you can see how big the bandwidth bill for schools are.
A genaeral rule of thumb for school IT depts is that if more than 60% of bandwidth is being saturated by students, services will be scaled back till that 60% goal is reached. other wise there may not be enough room for the schools needed data in the pipes.
After many years of debate, my school moved to a system where you can pay $250.00 a semster for unblocked access with no questions asked, even for P2P since the school can claim that they simply acted as an isp in selling us a connection, much the same as other ISP's do in court when people such as the RIAA target a student. This unblocked access has it's own connection and does not share with the school. In my example, the school expressly tells us that they will comply with any supenas to identify us but are otherwise released from liability.
If you choose not to pay, you can share the schools pipe and are blocked except for web browsing.
The school even broke down the economic of the change for the students so that there could be no complaints.
The point is that bandwidth is a sore issue for schools because they get accussed of having enough money when students don't know the economics and end up looking like the bad guy. even worse is if they cut back to far and a student claims they are stifling th flow of information and acting as a censor. for that reason many schools are hesitant to implament bandwidth caps, instaed blocking ports.
I hope i've shed some light on the schools motivation.
