In an attempt to make better use of the bandwidth that's available during the early morning, we've made some changes to the demand-side management system that applies to Internet quota. Effective from this evening, the following DSM scale factors apply:
  • Between 23:00 and 00:59, a scale factor of 0.2
  • Between 01:00 and 06:59, a scale factor of 0.04
  • Between 07:00 and 07:59, a scale factor of 0.2
  • Between 08:00 and 22:59, no scale factor (i.e. a scale factor of 1.0)

This means that the DSM period starts slightly earlier (11PM rather than midnight), but that downloads in the early part of the DSM period are slightly more "expensive" (a scale factor of 0.2 rather than 0.1). In the dead of the night, downloads have been made 20% "cheaper" (scale factor of 0.04 rather than 0.05). This period has also been extended and ends at 7AM rather than 6AM. These values replace the normal term-time DSM values.

Full details of the demand-side management system are available at http://www.ru.ac.za/quota/dsm.html. Users are encouraged to schedule the downloads of large files to take advantage of the "cheaper" bandwidth that's available overnight. Many download managers will allow you to schedule downloads to make use of this facility.


per-user & per-host Internet quotas have also been increased by approximately 10% (from 20MiB/day -> 22MiB/day for the per-user quota on Thursday last week).