[LINK] FVTS

[Glen Turner]

> This is clearly a pseudo-quote put into a media release by a 
> marketing person.  IT services people in universities know what 
> students *really* use bandwidth for, and that isn't it.

Service costs are set by the peak usage.  US universities
will be billed at "95th percentile" -- with their traffic
profile that is the usage at about 3pm.

As long as dorm usage doesn't come close to the 3pm peak,
it is essentially free traffic and the dominant cost of
Internet provision to dorms is the capital costs of the
cabling.

This goes a long way to explain the blase attitude of
US universities to dorm Internet usage. The panic over
P2P was that this traffic was becoming higher than the
3pm peak (as well as adding to the peak if dorm machines
were left running during the day).  That was fixed by
rate limiting dorm usage to be less than the 3pm peak.
The rate-limiting is done using equipment like Packeteer,
some of these can do the peak calculations themselves
and ensure that the dorms never add to the cost of the
university's Internet service.

The situation in Australia is different, as 95th percentile
charging isn't common here.

> More seriously, I saw mention recently of someone being in 
> negotiation with Vic Railways to use their long strips of land to 
> carry fibre.

We do that in South Australia already. It's not as convenient
as you'd hope. In metro areas there are these huge concrete
blocks called "railway stations" every few kilometers and
getting around those pushes the cost up considerably.