Our upstream service provider is currently undertaking an experiment in which they remove the throttling on our international bandwidth late at night. This allows Rhodes to make use of the full capacity of its Internet link for international traffic during these times, giving us an effective extra 3Mbps (or about 30%) of international bandwidth at night-time.
In order to allow users at Rhodes to take full advantage of this, we've made some changes to the way the Internet quota system works:
Between midnight and 7AM each night, we have reduced the effective "cost" of bandwidth to one tenth of its cost outside of these hours. This means that if you download 10MB of data at any time from midnight to 7AM, it will only count 1MB towards your quota. The same download from 7AM to midnight (i.e. during working hours) will count the full 10MB towards your quota. The idea of this is to encourage users at Rhodes to make larger downloads at night-time, when our Internet bandwidth is less saturated.
The small print in all of this is that this change is an experiment in demand-side management on our part. As such, we may alter the way it works, when it functions (currently 00:00 to 06:59) or the factor by which we scale downloads (currently 0.1) in the future in order to optimise the way it works. We will, of course, publish information of any such changes to this noticeboard. Depending on the effects of it, we may also discontinue this after TENET complete their experiments. Again, we'll give notice of this on this noticeboard. In the mean time, however, enjoy the extra bandwidth we have available after hours...