UCT to cap students internet access

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Despite graduating from UCT a few years ago I still receive mail from my old departments grads list. Today this came in my inbox:

UCT intends capping student internet access. The suggested cap is 200MB per student per month. Can I have some comment as to how it will affect us.
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All over the world university and college campuses are becoming test laboratories where new technologies are often implemented and tested first. A university campus in the US/Europe without campus wide Wi-Fi is probably considered a laughing stock. University administrators overseas are falling over each other because they can't give students fast internet acces quick enough. And yet here in SA, our premier institutions are forced to limit internet access to students no doubt to cut down on their exorbitant bandwidth costs thanks to a certain local telecommunications monopoly.

If you can't get cheap internet access at university then where else are you going to get it?

Someone please put a stop to this utter madness.
 
Considering how much university fees are, you'd think they could afford the bandwidth.
 
Oh Gods. Welcome to the internet. As shaped, and capped by example. By Tel-dom (pty) Ltd.

200megs?

For crying in a bucket! And this country wonders why students aren't going for scientific degrees, or why academic research in this country is a fsckup!

Also, I have it under pretty good authority, that UCT actually has more international bandwidth than many ISP's in this country.
 
UFS has been capping studens for 2 years now.
30 MB and after that you pay like R1 per meg.
 
lol
at my school (bishops) you can pick up the UCT wireless...your normally on for about 5 minutes, then you get kicked off :(
 
I will reiterate. The fscking government wonders why we suck on the science and research fronts?

hah.
 
mmm almost cheaper to just use your cellphone ..... don't think they have much of a choice though bandwith is expensive due to the big blue in sa
 
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I studied at University of Pretoria (completed a year or what back) and the situation was like this:
1) During my first three years: Internet only after 6PM. Not capped. Bear in mind that you could not connect you own computer and had to shuffle everything with a flash disk back and forth.
2) Then they decided to "give" the students internet access. You get R200 a YEAR worth of internet access. R2/MB before 6PM, R1/MB after 6PM.(The prices might be wrong but the R200/year is not - it might have been R1/Mb and R0.5/Mb. It doesn't make that big a differenc)
3) During the entire length of my course there were NO internet access in the Cisco Networking labs. Thats the place where we had to learn all about networks :-)
 
I just finished at UKZN and during my time there they had periods of capping and paying after the limit - or you could get more if you could prove it was for academic use. And some without.

It seemed too difficult a job for them to consistently keep the cap going.

But I also remember Internet Expertise lectures being devoid of the internet due to malfunctioning connections and slowness, so we really need to jack up our system. And what with all our bandwidth coming from a cable under the sea its not going to get better any time soon.

Isn't there a rumour that our only source of dsl is stopping accounts higher than 3gb?? So its not just the varsities that are restricting.
 
oober said:
UFS has been capping studens for 2 years now.
30 MB and after that you pay like R1 per meg.
Click to expand...
yeah, i studied at Cape Tech (now known as Kaput or something) and i finished june 2004. when i left we were capped at 30MB per YEAR! you got the 30MB free at registration and then you could purchase internet accounts for R30 for 30MB and R90 for 100MB or something like that. i never bought more than R30 vouchers.

i studied IT (lotsa research and surfing involved in finding answers) and i had to switch off ALL graphics and multimedia stuff when looking for examples of code and the like. text surfing sucks
 
Just another example of SA going backward, while the rest of the world is going forward.
 
Its the same at Rhodes... But u got unlimited access to the internal network so for all u naughty pirates out there, u would have no need to download stuff off the net cuz there was plenty on the resnet... ithink it was 2.5 TB of movies games etc... if thats not enough then i donno. So ur 200 MB per month was only for web browsein, all updates are downloaded to a server where u can get them (anti virus, win updates, game updates).
 
I'm doing elec eng at Wits.
In 1st and 2nd year we had access to a lab with always on connection. In 3rd year this year - cause of the fact that more than half the class has laptops - we have a sepparate lab where we can drop an ethernet cable into the LAN and get permanent connection.
There is no capping - but its damn slow. I think the 1st and 2nd year lab was about 40pc's struggling on about a 100-200kbps pipe
And the 3rd and 4th year lab has some fancy dynamic shaping system on it - even http was shaped if your download was bigger than about 200kB.
Even with the shaping - i'm sure i push more than 200Megs/pm through the 3rd year lab.

Transtel's headoffice is about 3 blocks from the campus - i hope the SNO takes pity on us :(
 
Capping and restrictions at varsities is rediculous. They are perhaps the only ones benefitting from major bandwidth sponsorships from SUN and various others.

Now that adsl is getting rediculous with pricing and capping they start to see this as a bucket to collect fees? WTF!!??
 
NameOfBeast said:
They (all?) use TENET (Tertiary Education Network):
http://www.tenet.ac.za/

Not clear what they pay Telkom per meg (anyone know?)
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That is correct - most Tertiary intitutions are connected to TENET. Its a backbone to provide the universities with interconnection and peering primarily as i understand it as well as some internet connectivity. Problem is that they still rely on Telkom's Diginet for the links in the TENET.

I think that some of the universities also have their own private ISP links purely for providing internet connectivity.

They have been given some preferential rates - but at the same time they are tied into long term contracts if i remember correctly. Also when the telecoms industry is over priced by 1000% - even a 50% discount puts our Universities at a disadvantage internationally.

[edit]
For some shocking stats and to understand why the universities are having to cap - take a look at their connection graphs:
http://www.tenet.ac.za/mrtg-new/graphs.asp#Site_Graphs
UCT has the biggest pipe to TENET... at only 16Mbps for the entire campus: http://www.tenet.ac.za/mrtg-new/uct-mc-ipnet-bb.html
[/edit]
 
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skuzzy said:
lol
at my school (bishops) you can pick up the UCT wireless...your normally on for about 5 minutes, then you get kicked off :(
Click to expand...

Yeah, I think they use MAC address filtering and the like.
 
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