How much has student usage of social media increased Universities’ internet traffic bills over the last 20 years?

Question

Not counting those that ban social media, but counting student Wi-Fi provision such as UK Eduroam.

I would consider site usage. Although I know there can be educational benefits to social media usage, I would include that in the usage considered. — Mark Green, May 30 '19 at 16:26
I'm not sure that this question is either answerable or appropriate for this site. — shoover, May 30 '19 at 17:00

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered May 30 '19 at 17:08

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How much has student usage of social media increased Universities’ internet traffic bills over the last 20 years?

This answer is rather speculative, but I am pretty sure it's 0 USD, for a number of reasons:

Broadband internet has gotten a lot cheaper in the last 20 years. Traffic growth from small- to medium-bandwidth services such as Twitter or Facebook is bound to be lower than the decline in per-data price.
The rise of high-bandwidth services such as Youtube and Netflix makes even discussing what impact a service such as Facebook has pretty much a waste of time.
Universities, like most end users, don't really pay per usage anyway. Of course you need a bigger, more expensive line if you have a lot more traffic, but that's a fairly coarse-grained metric that's basically impossible to narrow down to individual services.
There are almost infinite other confounding factors to consider when analyzing a long time frame such as 20 years, including changing student numbers, IoT devices, and changing scientific work practices.
...

answered May 30 '19 at 17:08

xLeitix

Your second bullet point highlights the problem in giving a given site just one label. E.g. Youtube is often considered social media, even though not everyone uses the site that way. It also depends on region - Facebook produces more traffic than Netflix in the Asia-Pacific region, for example. – Anyon May 30 '19 at 17:39
@Anyon Re: Youtube as social media - sure, if you are lenient enough with your definition of social media, most web traffic is social media. Re: Facebook versus Netflix - does Facebook also produce more traffic than other more regionally important streaming services (not a rethorical question, I'm genuinely curious)? – xLeitix May 30 '19 at 18:00
The report I linked to has some related discussion on p. 15. The top downstream application in Asia-Pacific is generic HTTP media streaming, which includes local streaming providers, but they don't seem to resolve individual services. Facebook Video comes second at roughly half as much downstream traffic. It seems likely that some local alternatives would produce more traffic locally, but not cover as many countries. – Anyon May 30 '19 at 18:19

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