On 13 May 2002 Sam.Wilson@ed.ac.uk wrote:
Whilst this is one way to view the JANET Connection Rolicy and AUP (<http://www.ja.net/documents/connection_policy.pdf>, <http://www.ja.net/documents/use.html>) in practice there seems to be quite a bit more latitude. The getouts are in clauses that talk about things like "benefits to the Higher and Further Education and Research Council community". One possible application is in providing services to alumni rather than current students. I don't know if any precedents have been set on JANET yet but it's an obvious area.
I think this is now more than a shade off-topic (:-) but yes a university may feel it wants to offer connectivity to past students/staff. However the bulk of these will not live locally, nor will the university offer local rate dial-up nationally. In the UK case, UKERNA used to have an arrangement with U-NET that gave (current) students local rate dialup to a national service, and that was a recommended alternative to universities (or more likely the small colleges) who didn't want to manage their own dialup. But that was terminated (http://www.ja.net/services/jnds/). In terms of the get-outs, I expect that commercial spin-offs or products from the universities (e.g. a university selling intelligent widgets) may be hosted from a university with such a spin-off. However, at my own university we do this sort of activity via a commercial leased line, but I agree the rules have become more lax (we are in effect paying twice for bandwidth to be "clean") and that's why I used words like "generally" to Francis... the really fuzzy area is universities who use their academic connectivity to give students access from halls of residence, which if done with open ADSL-like rules may well let students run commercial services. Tim