Cornell Implementing Bandwidth Charges

[Peter Motyka]

Posted by michael on Thursday March 06, @04:32PM
from the information-wants-to-be-expensive dept.
Sabalon writes "Cornell University is planning on implementing a plan where if faculty, staff or students use more than 2GB of bandwidth a month, they will be charged for the additional bandwidth usage. The article mentions that last year over 100,000GB worth of files were sent from Cornell's network. I'm sure this is not the only school doing this or moving to this. I'm sure the conspiracy theory people will see this as a suggestion by Microsoft to stop students from getting those pesky Linux iso images. At least, according to the RIAA, CD sales around Cornell should now skyrocket :)" It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. Since students often have accounts on several different university machines, I suspect the more rebellious ones will be running an assortment of proxies and redirections to get around the restrictions.

http://slashdot.org/articles/03/03/06/1610252.shtml?tid=95&tid=146

[Jerry]

Hmmm, I wonder if this would actually save the CS Department Money.

We get charged $5 per month for every network jack that is turned on whether it is being used or not. So, EB 2029 alone costs us about $200 per month. We also pay for 1036, 1022, all the CS Faculty Offices, Network Lab in Founders, HCI Lab, and likely a few other places I'm not thinking of.

Of course if we did that here you would have another little window on your screen that showed how much "Down Load Money" you have in your accout. :-o

[Jim Sodam]

Yeah, and your download money would be drastically different every time you login  :-P