Holding your breath for more Internet
a champ at holding his breath by Pfau The Education Minister Bronwyn Pike today announced that Victorian government schools will enjoy free internet access from the first day of term one in 2010, "All Victorian government schools will have their internet charges covered by the Brumby Labor Government." Whilst this has some cost benefits for schools, schools still have a role to play rather than leave the Internet taps left open and running on full.
There is only so much you can shove down a pipe at once or to put it another way, inviting more people to eat your birthday cake means that the birthday party will take longer (lag) and there will be less for each to eat (bandwidth).
Our experience to date is that if we didn't have in place some mechanisms to monitor and gently cap the usage (ala bandwidth throttling controls for admin / staff / students) it can run out of control and everybody suffers. This has always been the dilemma of the virtual commons. There are some great commercial and open source tools that help us manage and track our usage.
I once used the rule of thumb that you should at least be able to click on a link and hold your breath until the page refreshes (30 seconds) although lately, I notice that people are less patient and get angry if there isn't a response after a few seconds.