Network & telephone services

Network connections and charges for institutions

Usage charging for network traffic

Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are charged for part of the cost of JANET by the Higher Education Funding Council for England and the other regional HE funding councils. Although, originally, the charge to HEIs was on the basis of their transatlantic traffic, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) decided at its meeting on 28 March 2002 that a formula-based model reflecting institutional size, according to HESA annual statistics, should be used.

The University's IT Syndicate agreed at its June 2002 meeting that from 1 August of that year, the JANET networking charge should be recovered by quarterly charges based on all incoming traffic from and outgoing traffic to JANET for the previous quarter. The Computing Service invoices individual Colleges, Schools, and other institutions quarterly in arrears (usually early November, February, May, and August), except that any bill of less than £5 will be carried forward to the next quarter or the end of the financial year. The charge is based on the actual chargeable traffic attributed to the institution during that quarter, scaled so that the total across all institutions is the same as the amount invoiced by Janet(UK), allowing for VAT.

The JANET network charging web page references a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that shows the charges to HEIs for the AY 1 Aug 2009 to 31 Jul 2010. The charge for the University of Cambridge is £280,961.24; this is an increase of £10,233.25 on the previous year's charge. This charge corresponds to about £0.10p/GB or about 0.010p/MB based on the amount of network traffic measured between 1 Aug 2008 and 31 Jul 2009.

• The traffic that is subject to charging is measured by the Computing Service at the router that connects to JANET.
• For appropriate traffic (web pages that can be cached for reuse by others), traffic via the University's Web Cache is discounted according to the averge reusability of the data - currently a factor of 0.8 is applied, so that the charge for using the cache is 80% of the charge if the cache was not used to access the web page. Where the page is not appropriate for caching, there is no reduction for using the cache. Thus it is always cost-effective to use the cache, the only penalty being an increase in response time.

The title of this document is: Cambridge University Data Network (CUDN): Usage charging for network traffic
URL: http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/network/connections/usagecharge.html

Last updated: 16 September 2009