University Internet Cap

[SLCentral]

My school's internet service allows 15GB of traffic a month. We have a DC++ server set up with 40+ TB for downloading stuff, but 15GB really isn't enough for a college student. I can't possibly see how a school that costs a significant amount of money a year can possibly cap internet...

Past 15GB it'll cost $1.50 a GB. Not a lot, but it adds up quick. I feel like I don't even use the computer that much for non-school-related stuff, and yet I'm at 13GB only halfway through the month. Fuck you, cheap university bastards!

 

[LS8]

It's a hard knock life...

 

[theevilsharpie]

Cry more.

 

[Colt45]

steal from neighbours and/or make a friend in IT and/or hax0r

 

[LS8]

Cry more.

That's cry moar. Get it right.

 

[DanDaManJC]

you could try SSH tunneling through some other, on campus computer. that-a-way as far as YOUR connection's concerned all that traffic would be in-house, and thus not cost your dorm any money.

tunnelings really easy with putty and a good linux computer.. if you're in any engineering or science degree then you should have access to some linux pcs.

 

[RedCOMET]

ouch..so dracanian. But its their network. Use/ abuse that DC++. They possibly cap Internet to help control cost. But 15 GB seems kinda Low, especially when you have to access stuff that is not on the shool network. Using IM and other web services can cause that cap to get used up rather quick.

How long has this policy been implemented? Is there a way to apeal it / increase the cap? Does the school offer other services (beside the DC++ server) to help its students stay under the cap, for example like an Internal Campus IM system ?

 

[DaWhim]

15gb a month is pretty generous

i used to have 1.5gb/1000 minutes a week. yea, 1000 minutes a week, that is roughly 2.5 hours of internet a day.

 

[LS8]

Jeeeze guys, what's he supposed to do? Pay for media like most regular people? Get real!

 

[DanDaManJC]

15gb a month is pretty generous

i used to have 1.5gb/1000 minutes a week. yea, 1000 minutes a week, that is roughly 2.5 hours of internet a day.

jeez. that's just enough to check your email and such. what were the computer science kids supposed to do? i mean sure, programming can be done offline... but just learning how to search for information (ie google), downloading and fiddling with linux installs etc is an integral part of an education

 

[ric1287]

Jeeeze guys, what's he supposed to do? Pay for media like most regular people? Get real!

I love this response....you realize that colleges bill somewhere in the ballpark of a few hundred bucks for this "free" internet, right?

Also, this is where a MAC changer/spoofer is your friend (unless its tied to the room directly and not the machine.)

 

[LS8]

I love you, too.

 

[DanDaManJC]

Jeeeze guys, what's he supposed to do? Pay for media like most regular people? Get real!

except that there're plenty of legit uses of bandwidth that could go over 15gb?

 

[Leros]

When I lived in the dorms we had a 20GB a month cap. It was tough, especially for people who games, downloaded movies (legit or not), etc.

Somebody set up a tunneling box in some corner of some basement on campus. That saved me.

 

[GoodRevrnd]

Also, this is where a MAC changer/spoofer is your friend (unless its tied to the room directly and not the machine.)

This is what I was going to say (a friend in college a few years ago did this and hosted an FTP server, wrote a service to change the MAC every few hours =p), but odds are if they're able to bill for overages it that means it's tied to the jack in the wall or it will only accept registered MAC addresses.

 

[RedCOMET]

This is what I was going to say (a friend in college a few years ago did this and hosted an FTP server, wrote a service to change the MAC every few hours =p), but odds are if they're able to bill for overages it that means it's tied to the jack in the wall or it will only accept registered MAC addresses.

My university required us to use a PPOE client to authenticate to the dorm network. Then they change the authentication method to 802.1x my sophomore year for the dorms. For the OP, if he's required to authenticate to the network like i was, then regardless of what he does, his bandwidth usage will still be counted.

 

[PCTC2]

I average at home 60GB/month over my Time Warner. But even in school, never had a cap, and at work I don't either.

 

[irishScott]

No cap here, but if we download more than 1GB/day we get throttled, which basically means we go from 5 MB/s to 400 KB/s. Yet somehow we muddle through...

 

[JimmiG]

I'm surprised they don't block or take down that DC server.

The school's internet connection is for students to do stuff related to their studies. It's not up to the school to provide entertainment, illegal or not. You should be glad they provide you with 15GB a month - you'd really only need a couple of hundred MB's a month to download reports and search for information related to your studies... If everyone kept downloading like mad, the Internet might perform poorly or not work at all for students that need need it for school-related stuff.

 

[RedArmy]

I'm surprised they don't block or take down that DC server.

The school's internet connection is for students to do stuff related to their studies. It's not up to the school to provide entertainment, illegal or not. You should be glad they provide you with 15GB a month - you'd really only need a couple of hundred MB's a month to download reports and search for information related to your studies... If everyone kept downloading like mad, the Internet might perform poorly or not work at all for students that need need it for school-related stuff.

You better be joking. You've either never done anything that involved downloading huge files (like SDK's for programming or updates for specific environments) or you don't know what you're talking about. Simple downloading of PDF's for datasheets can add up quick and what are you supposed to do if you have to remote log in to servers to run a virtual machine of some O/S that you wouldn't otherwise have (I do this almost every day).

 

[ther00kie16]

we got throttled to 56k speed if our 7 day accumulated bandwidth went over 5gb. and it's authenticated and tied to your ID so no chance a change of mac address or anything like that would work.

 

[Chriscross3234]

No internet cap here that I know of, only 90 bucks a semester too. In fact, reading through our support website, they even encourage the legitimate use of p2p networking as long as we don't upload.

 

[darkswordsman17]

You better be joking. You've either never done anything that involved downloading huge files (like SDK's for programming or updates for specific environments) or you don't know what you're talking about. Simple downloading of PDF's for datasheets can add up quick and what are you supposed to do if you have to remote log in to servers to run a virtual machine of some O/S that you wouldn't otherwise have (I do this almost every day).

Something tells me they can tell the difference between connecting to computers on campus and ones off campus. Pretty much any department that you will have need of stuff like that will have their own computer labs and networks for you to get on.

And regardless of your opinion of it, plenty of schools put caps specifically to try to limit piracy. Sure it probably doesn't do much, and yes, there's certainly a lot of people being punished for the abuse of some, but schools don't exactly have a lot of options.

 

[DanDaManJC]

yeah they can tell the difference between on-campus and off campus traffic. they (the uni) get charged for the off campus traffic... but the point still stands that there are plenty of legitimate uses for outside bandwidth usage that are directly related to your schooling. especially if you're in some kind of computer engineering degree where you do actually have to troll through a ton of datasheets and piles of source code...

 

[EarthwormJim]

One more reason why I live at home