Because IAIT won't
CS students at Rose are perpetually haunted by the specter of the bandwidth policy. Although it was revised this year, the terms are still pretty onerous for people who tend to consume a lot of the Internet:
- After the first 3GB downloaded (or uploaded) in a 36-hour window, total speed gets cut to 1024kbps
- After another 500MB in the same window, total speed drops to 160kbps
There are a number of discounts in place (traffic between 2am and 6am, for example, only “costs” 40% of actual usage), but it’s entirely possible to go over the limits and not realize it until you can’t load YouTube videos any more.
As a result, I started developing a RoseBandwidth iOS application a while ago. It scrapes the web page showing bandwidth usage for students and formats the data nicely, even keeping a history of past bandwidth use.
The problem is that the Rose bandwidth server isn’t available off-campus, and so for testing purposes (and the Apple review process) I needed another bandwidth service to scrape with the same format as the IAIT page.
So after a few quick lines of PHP and a grab of the existing bandwidth-check HTML template, I came up with the randomized bandwidth usage page. It’s accessible anywhere in the world - even over the cell network, for mobile devices - and it picks a weighted random bandwidth usage number for each of the four “big” measures.
If anyone out there winds up developing a client that checks Rose bandwidth and uses this page for testing, shoot me an email (tim@pneumaticsystem.com) - I’d love to hear about it.