A major factor in my decision to stay in the Reshalls, and I'm sure this is true for others as well, is the reliable high speed internet connection provided. I place a high price on this connection, as it's really the only factor that I use to justify the price difference between what I consider reasonable for my 158 square feet of living space and the roughly $460/month I actually pay. If NTS radically limits my bandwidth, and performance drops to near dial-up levels, or even below cable modem levels, I'm out of student housing, and I suspect many others will leave as well. If I can live more cheaply elsewhere and get more bandwidth for less per month without having to worry about an overzealous "big brother"-like organization like NTS peering over my shoulder, I'm going to do it, and I suspect others will follow.

While this helps Housing's crowding problem, it certainly can't help recruitment of new students. There are a number of schools that are beginning to do this, and they're treading on shaky ground. If they limit things to the point of being unusable or even objectionable, word will get around and suddenly student housing will have trouble getting residents and face major financial problems (nearly all student housing operations are self-supporting), in addition to a possible negative impact on new student enrollment. Everyone has grown to expect excellent quality of service from Resnet, and nobody's going to settle for less.

I thought I'd also point out that this all didn't just come out of the blue... but I'm quite surprised that it happened this quickly and with so much secrecy. There was a pretty good discussion of this on the net-people mailing list in early to mid January on this topic. I unfortunately did not save all the e-mails, but I've attached what's in the archives online (they switched listserv software in the middle of the discussion and thus it's a partial archive). The general consensus was that "traffic shaping," which is what the Packeteer box does, was the best option over a bandwidth quota system as bandwidth quotas are difficult to manage from an accounting and administrative perspective.

Interestingly, the director of the U's Digital Technology Center, Andrew Odlyzko, is an expert on information networks, including traffic growth and the economics of bandwidth providers. His papers on the subject are here: http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/networks.html One of his messages is in the archive below... the other isn't in the archives and had some very interesting statistics in it from other universities and organizations from his research. I might be able to dig it out of my backups... I'm not sure though.

Another point brought up is how limiting student bandwidth use potentially violates the University's stated mission here: http://www1.umn.edu/systemwide/factsmission.html. I know the recent "experimenting" that NTS has been doing severely limited my educational use of the network this past weekend as I was updating a number of opensource programs that require large downloads (ie. gimp, ghostscript, windowmaker).