Earlier in the year we started experimenting with a demand side management system that allowed "cheaper" downloads at certain times of the day. Whilst it appears that this has been reasonably successful, it has only shifted demand to between midnight and about 2:30AM. We suspect that this is because people remain awake to take advantage of this, rather than using download managers that support proper scheduling functions.

In an effort to better utilise the slack bandwidth that's available in the very early hours of the morning, we're making some changes to the previously announced scaling factors. Effective immediately, downloads between 03:00 and 05:59 will be made even "cheaper". A full list of the scaling factors applied is:
  • 00:00 to 02:59 -- scaling factor of 0.1 (i.e. a 10MB download will be billed as 1MB)
  • 03:00 to 05:59 -- scaling factor of 0.05 (i.e. a 10MB download will be billed as 0.5MB)
  • 06:00 to 06:59 -- scaling factor of 0.1 (i.e. a 10MB download will be billed as 1MB)
  • 07:00 to 23:59 -- scaling factor of 1 (i.e. a 10MB download will be billed as 10MB)

Like the previous announcement, this change is part of 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 and 0.05, depending on time) in the future in order to optimise the way it works. In particular, the factor used between midnight and 3AM may have to change. We will, of course, publish information of any further such changes to this noticeboard.