SOURCE: The Chronicle of Higher Education
DATE : Thursday, March 6, 2003
TITLE : New Cornell U. System Will Meter Network Use and Charge
: for 'Extreme' Amounts
AUTHOR: By FLORENCE OLSEN
Cornell University officials have developed a new "pay by the drink"
billing system that will charge students and employees incrementally
for Internet use as a way of controlling what officials call
"irrational consumption" of bandwidth.
Cornell's costs for providing Internet services -- currently about
$1.4-million a year -- are going up by more than 40 percent annually,
and the university says it had to do something to moderate that
spending, or at least find a fairer way to recover its expenses. Too
many users have found an enterprising way to avoid paying their full
share of the network's cost, says R. David Vernon, director of
information-technology architecture.
The new billing system, which Cornell expects to begin using July 1,
is more equitable than the one it replaces, officials say; it is also
more complicated. The new system incorporates data collected from
network-router logs. The logs provide an irrefutable record of which
departments and users are consuming the most Internet bandwidth.
Although charging by volume is not a brand-new idea, few if any
colleges have creating billing systems to do that, says Mark A. Luker,
a vice president of the education-technology consortium Educause.
Typically, colleges bill departments for network use by how many ports
they use, he says. "Ports" are the wall jacks where users plug their
computers into the network. Students in dormitories usually pay a fixed
fee for use of the network.
Cornell has devoted a considerable amount of effort to developing new
charge-back methods and related policies, all aimed at slowing down its
rising costs for Internet bandwidth, Mr. Vernon says. The problem of
sharply rising bandwidth consumption is especially acute at Cornell,
which pays more than some other institutions for Internet bandwidth
because of its distance from Nysernet, the New York State Education
and Research Network, in Syracuse, where it connects to the Internet.
Cornell has previously charged departments for the number of network
ports they used. But according to Mr. Vernon, "entrepreneurial" staff
and faculty members began using devices, called multiport repeaters,
to plug more than one computer into a single network port.
The devices, available at low cost from any store that sells electronic
hardware, let users add 5, 10, or more computers to the network through
a single port. Users who bought them "were doing the best they could
to provide the services for as low a cost as possible to their
department," Mr. Vernon says. "But it really didn't do the rest of the
campus justice."
To cover the loss of network-port fees from some departments, Cornell
raised the amount it charged per port, which meant that users who were
not adding multiple computers per port were being penalized. People
didn't like it, Mr. Vernon says.
The new billing system cost about $250,000 to develop. It uses three
separate charges, instead of one, to recover the university's data-
network costs, which add up to $8.5-million a year.
Academic and administrative offices will be charged a monthly per-port
fee of $7.50. In addition, schools will be charged an "infrastructure
tax," which will be assessed in the same way as other overhead costs.
The infrastructure tax is meant to cover the cost of the campus-network
backbone, Mr. Vernon says.
The last -- and most debated -- charge is a new Internet-use fee, which
some officials refer to as the "pay by the drink" plan. The fee will
be based on the bandwidth consumption associated with a specific
network address, known as an IP number. Every computer on a network has
a unique IP number.
For each IP number belonging to an employee's computer, Cornell will
charge an Internet-use fee of $4 a month for downloading or serving 2
gigabytes of information. For every megabyte over the basic allocation,
individual employees or their departments will be charged a fraction
of a cent. (A gigabyte is approximately 1 billion bytes, and a megabyte
is approximately 1 million bytes.) Any employee who uses the Internet
to download or serve less than 2 gigabytes of data in a month will pay
no Internet-use fee.
Charges for students will differ slightly. They will each be charged a
combined port-and-infrastructure fee of $26.35 a month for nine months.
A $4-a-month Internet-use fee will be included in their room rates.
The same fees for Internet use above 2 gigabytes per month will apply.
By setting the threshold at 2 gigabytes, Cornell officials say that 90
percent of the IP numbers on campus will escape usage charges.
Many colleges, including Cornell, have resorted to using technical
means to restrict students' use of Internet bandwidth. But Cornell
officials say they prefer that students and employees make informed
choices about how much bandwidth they want to use. The new billing
system, they say, is designed to let them make those choices.
Services such as Web cams that show the progress of building
construction on campus but consume lots of bandwidth may be
reconsidered when the new billing system takes effect, Mr. Vernon says.
A bigger cause of rising Internet costs is recreational file sharing.
At Cornell, the single largest use of the Internet is for sending
outbound KaZaA files. KaZaA is a program used mainly for sharing music
and video files. Last year, users sent more than 100,000 gigabytes
worth of KaZaA files from Cornell's network.
Mr. Vernon says the new billing system will help students and others
understand the costs associated with such "extreme use" of the
Internet -- although in some cases, he says, students are unaware that
their computers are being used for KaZaA exchanges. Friends or remote
intruders may be using the machines without the owners' knowledge.
University officials sent out letters to researchers -- including those
who, for example, move around large amounts of sky-telescope data -- to
warn them of the billing changes. The university offered "to round off
the sharp edges" for researchers who will be adversely affected.
The system for recovering network costs will be backed up by a new
universitywide policy on data privacy, says Tracy Beth Mitrano, policy
adviser and director of computer law and policy at Cornell.
University officials say they needed to reassure individual users and
department heads that information about IP numbers collected from the
router logs would not be misused or even displayed in their bills,
unless requested. The new data-stewardship policy is scheduled to go
into effect sometime this month.
The university has walked a fine line to avoid billing changes that
would stifle research or education or cost too much, Mr. Vernon says.
"We don't want to lose stuff that's important," he adds, "while we're
weeding out stuff that's not."
