>> As a side note, a friend from several years ago attended University of Queensland, and at that time they implemented a program to provide only extremely limited volume of bandwidth to students which made geographically distributed collaboration much more difficlt.

As a UQ student from '04 to '07 I recall having those limits, and it wasn't that dissimilar to what you'd get on almost every ISP at the time (factoring in that it was there for tens of thousands of students so the quota itself was far lower than your monthly home one). I can't recall if the quota counted AARNet (sort of an AU uni peering arrangement) traffic or not but my stomach says it specifically excluded that, so you could pull as much data from other unis and research institutions as you wanted, which helped alleviate a bit of that pain. Certainly overseas was difficult back then though. Also, I didn't live on campus so it wasn't also my personal internet quota.

Quotas are still a thing here even now, though. My ISP gives me 250GB/mo for $50/mo. You can thank being on a desert island for part of the reason quotas exist. They're beginning to disappear but it's still a notable thing if the plan is unlimited quota.

e: split my comment for better context

Our problem was we were a team with half in California and half in Ipswitch and we were designing for the case of geographically distributed teams... It was a real pain when we literally couldn't connect with our partners because they were out of quota. I get it and I can't imagine. If your see my other comments I was running several encrypted "hosting" services off my Stanford connection at about 10,000x the quota imposed on you guys. The only consequence of which was receiving a monthly letter advising me to use bandwidth for only legal purposes, they never knew what I was doing and I'm not saying. The UQ policy was certainly grounded in rationalized arguments, but when you have a department dedicated to New Media Design (or whatever the IxD program was called), restricting bandwidth is highly counterproductive...

Current UQ student here. They currently provide 40GB a month. If that's not enough, you're probably torrenting.

40GB is like one week's worth of one hour a night HD video. That's emphatically not enough.

Imagine if you're running netflix ;)

You cannot be serious. I use ~120GB a month and I don't consider myself a heavy user. I don't torrent. I do watch Netflix.

Edit: 40GB a month works out to one hour a day at 3.2Mbps. I have a 100Mbps connection. If I used half its capacity for only an hour a day, I'd consume about 630GB/month.

40 GB is easy to hit with all kinds of legitimate uses, especially since most people do a mixture of things. In some months, I probably would fill more than half of that quota with university homework, and e.g. someone reinstalling their PC with all the software on it easily goes into the tens of GBs as well. As can YouTube, Twitch, ...

The year after I finished at Griffith, they implemented a 'Unlimited free internet downloads during off-peak hours' policy. Just reading up on it though, it's not as good value as I first thought: the first 5GB are full-speed, then thereafter you're capped to 64kbps off-peak for the rest of the calendar month.

This was UQ Ipswitch (at that time that's where the IxD program was, no?) ? And this was 2009.

I think they had a maybe 200 MB/mo.

At the same time at Stanford, I was using about 50 TB/mo.

Edit: update: I was one of the largest bandwidth users, they sent me a letter every month. No I will not go into detail.

I was a UQ student 2005-08 and can confirm you got 150mb/month quota with the option to buy more at $10/gb. If you lived on campus that was your only option for Internet.

Thankfully they've upped it now.

Thanks for confirming this. My 2009 date was off, it was actually 2007 and I glad you clarified for me. My 200 MB/month was based on rough memory and I thought I might have made it up.

And they wonder why DCHubs were so prolific through the UQ colleges...