Colleges Try to Figure Out How to Keep Bandwidth Costs Under Control

Brian D. Voss gets philosophical when he discusses the cost of Internet bandwidth.

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"The more bandwidth you have, the more will be used," he says. "Nature abhors unused megabits."

The quip reflects the quandary that many information-technology officers like Mr. Voss, of Indiana University at Bloomington, face in trying to meet, and pay for, students' insatiable appetite for bandwidth.

"At a macro level, everyone's buying more," says Christopher B. Peabody, director of networking and computing services at Georgetown University. "They're typically spending 50 to 100 percent more each year." Georgetown raised its bandwidth capacity 66 percent last year and 80 percent this year, to 45 megabits per second, at a cost of $14,800 per month. Most colleges pay $250 to $350 per month for each megabit per second of Internet service, he says. A megabit is a million ones and zeros of binary data; megabits per second is the common way of measuring bandwidth.

The amount of bandwidth a college needs depends on the number of its users and the size of the files they are sending, says J. Gary Augustson, vice provost and executive director of information systems at Pennsylvania State University at University Park. Larger institutions -- and users who send larger files, such as video and research material -- generally require more bandwidth.

Michael R. Zastrocky, a vice president specializing in higher education at Gartner Research, a technology-research company, says that no hard data exist on bandwidth costs. One trend, though, is that for institutions of the same size, those that do research need three to four times as much bandwidth as those that do not. A 20,000-student research university might buy 155 megabits per second, while a 20,000-student community college might buy only 45 megabits per second. Bandwidth needs range from 3 to 9 megabits per second for smaller colleges to 45 to 90 megabits per second or more for larger research universities.

Cost Versus Cushion

Internet-service providers charge a monthly fee based on the bandwidth rate customers use, Mr. Augustson says. Colleges determine their bandwidth needs as best they can, with most aiming to spend less than leading-edge users but to have a cushion over the minimum that their campuses need to function. For example, Indiana University at Bloomington has bought 90 megabits per second of bandwidth in two 45-megabit-per-second connections, or pipes, to make sure it meets the needs of its 35,000 on-campus users.

Many factors, Mr. Peabody says, determine the price a college actually pays for its connection, including how much bandwidth it buys, what kind of circuit the college uses to connect to the Internet, and what company supplies that circuit. And, as in real estate, location matters -- institutions closer to the national networks pay less than those far away. Some colleges that can afford to increase their bandwidth cannot do so because their local connection to the Internet backbone has not been upgraded to faster equipment, Mr. Zastrocky says.

Competition among Internet-service providers is the No. 1 issue that determines bandwidth price, says Mr. Augustson. "When you can truly have competition, the price goes down," he says. In the past 18 months, he adds, competition has sprung up in many places, especially remote areas, that haven't seen it before.

"If you have the demand and the funding, it pays to get as much as you can afford," says Mr. Voss, who is associate vice president for telecommunications at Indiana. One plus to buying more bandwidth is that the monthly cost per megabit per second drops somewhat as the volume used increases, he says. Advances in technology also allow institutions to buy more capacity for the same price. But even as the per-megabit price drops, bandwidth budgets often stay flat or increase as colleges try to keep up with demand.

One consolation in the bandwidth scramble is that, by and large, colleges can't buy too much bandwidth. "Unused bandwidth may be an oxymoron, because it doesn't take long for the vacuum to be filled," says Keith E. Folsom, director of systems and communications at Pacific Lutheran University.

Even so, every higher-education institution is seeking ways to minimize the high cost of Internet service, says Larry Rapagnani, assistant provost for information technologies at the University of Notre Dame.

Educause, an academic-technology consortium, has a bandwidth-pricing group that discusses cheaper alternatives.

Another solution comes from a new class of vendors that charge only $10 to $75 per megabit per month, says Mr. Peabody.

Georgetown, Tufts University, and other institutions have signed up with Cogent, a fiber-optic carrier that charges $10 per megabit per second per month. Cogent charges so little because it provides its own end-to-end fiber-optic network that carries only data, says David Schaeffer, the company's chief executive officer. That reduces the complexity of the system, increases its speed and volume, and reduces overhead costs, he says.

Few companies offer such cheap rates, though, and Cogent serves only 20 major cities. "We're not going out to places in the middle of nowhere," Mr. Schaeffer says.