This won't appear in your scrapbook of annoying internet error messages in the next year. It represents, though, fears of university network administrators over plans to change the way network access through JANET is funded. Joint Information Systems Committee Secretary Malcolm Read wrote to IT Directors on 22 September that of "the probability of the JISC having to raise additional funds for international links from 1 August 1998". This will be done by charging higher education institutions for the volume of data which they ship across the Atlantic.

Read stressed to the THES that JISC policy is to charge for "scarce resources" and that "at the moment JANET's transatlantic link is the only identified scarce resource." He expects the charging formula to be based on the volume of incoming data, above a threshold representing use of the existing 45 million-bit-per-second transatlantic link. JISC now spends £20M a year on international links, and demand for the US link is trebling each year. On the assumption that JISC needs an extra £2.5 million in the financial year 1998-99, typical universities will pay £10,000 to £40,000 - but Manchester Oxford, Cambridge and Edinburgh £100,000 or more.

Professor Alistair Chalmers, retired Chair of the JISC Advisory Committee on Networking, notes the background to this: "There are of course politicians - rather, there's a Zeitgeist feeling that the block provision of networking is a Sixties welfare thing." Since JANET was founded in 1989, its costs have been "top-sliced" from the funding councils. Read says "the funding councils have made their decision" not to increase top-slicing - and charging by volume of data "gives universities an incentive to control their usage... by investing in local caches [of data frequently requested from the USA], or by investigating who is using the link and at student use." At the University of Edinburgh Computer Service, Dr Richard Field sees the proposal as "the thin end of a steep wedge - within one or two years what else will be charged for?" His immediate concern is with the increased record-keeping required: "Swallowing a £100,000 bill is not the way the university here does things." Departments will, he predicts, want to know how much of the extra charge results from their activity. Maintaining detailed records of what transatlantic data went to what department could, network economists agree, double the cost of running the university's network. David Wallace, Vice-Principal at Loughborough University, shares the concern: "I have no way of charging the faculties or the users."

"If bill rises to £500,000, we might say that we didn't want to be part of this service any more," Field continues: "though you'd have to spend a lot to equal JANET's quality of service." Universities running services for the entire academic or wider community face particular problems. JISC has promised to "address the issue" of Imperial College's estimated £270,000 bill, due to hosting the SunSite archive and cache. But what of NISS, SCRAN, and even the OPACs? Some find it too early to comment, and others would consider leaving JANET. Will such services be forced to exclude non-academic users? "Not," Read says, "so long as they can raise the funding." Welcome to the market.

The 16 December JISC Network Strategy Workshop will hear George McLaren describe how charges for international data have worked in Australia. So far, universities there have rarely passed costs to departments. The meeting promises to be heated.

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Written
10 Nov 1997

A version of this article appeared as the lead of the Times Higher Education Supplement Multimedia section (p. i) on 14 Nov 1997.

This version is © copyright 1997 Mike Holderness; moral rights are asserted.