What Does Your Varsity Charge for Internet?

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hambone

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A liitle here, a little there; South Africa
/Apologies if this isn't the right place to be asking this/

So, Stellenbosch charges in two usage times:

A - 0.05/MB or R51.20/GB [Daytime]
B - 0.01/MB or R10.24/GB [Late Night and Weekends]

Rhodes didn't used to charge (not sure if it's changed) but did make use of a quota system which progressively increased over the years.

What are the other Universities charging? Please let me know whether you're paying per GB or by Usage Quota AND whether you're limited on certain protocols like NNTP/Torrents.
​

So far reports look like this -
  • Wits - FREE
  • UKZN - FREE
  • CPUT - FREE
  • RU - FREE [Non 'HTTP' Throttled] [2 Week 3GB Quota] / R1600 for private computers 'connection fee'
    00:00 to 02:59 -- scaling factor of 0.1 (i.e. a 10MB download will be billed as 1MB)
    03:00 to 05:59 -- scaling factor of 0.05
    06:00 to 06:59 -- scaling factor of 0.1
    07:00 to 23:59 -- scaling factor of 1​
  • SUN - Charged per MB / + R380 Private computers 'connection fee'
    07:00-22:59 R51.20
    23:00-06H59 and Weekends R10.24 per GB​
  • UWC - FREE
  • UCT - FREE [3GB Monthly Quota]
  • UJ - FREE
 
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I'm not a student, but a staff member at UKZN, but I don't think they charge our students here. Never heard any of the student talk about charges for internet.
 
The Stellenbosch students must really abuse the internet as the University of the Witwatersrand doesn't charge students for internet.

I don't think the University of Johannesburg charges student. I stand to be corrected though...
 
When I was at TUKS we didn't pay for internet access but we were limited to 200MB/year, that was for IT students. Normal students got 100MB/year.

This was a good 10 years ago though.
 
Shads said:
I'm not a student, but a staff member at UKZN, but I don't think they charge our students here. Never heard any of the student talk about charges for internet.
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Yup no additional charges but certain websites are blocked during the day. There used to be a cap on how much you can download but I don't think it applies anymore
 
I think most other (non-Stb) Universities would only allow HTTP & HTTPS traffic, where you have to use their Proxy servers if I'm not mistaken?
 
hambone, I downloaded stuff and browsed at Stellies a lot and even back then the internet was faster than it is at Wits now. So what if you have to pay. I used to pay 50c a meg. What you pay now is almost nothing and why would you want to download Gigs there anyway? I thought you guys had another arrangement for stuff.
 
Pada said:
I think most other (non-Stb) Universities would only allow HTTP & HTTPS traffic, where you have to use their Proxy servers if I'm not mistaken?
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Correct - I know RU doesn't allow Torrent/NNTP, I am sure the others have similar policies.

phoneJunky said:
hambone, I downloaded stuff and browsed at Stellies a lot and even back then the internet was faster than it is at Wits now. So what if you have to pay. I used to pay 50c a meg. What you pay now is almost nothing and why would you want to download Gigs there anyway? I thought you guys had another arrangement for stuff.
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2133829345.png

Aforementioned 'system' is in a state of flux presently and is missing most of the latest 'distros'. Speedtest for me? People are pulling torrents here and paying mega bucks...
 
grim said:
When I was at TUKS we didn't pay for internet access but we were limited to 200MB/year, that was for IT students. Normal students got 100MB/year.

This was a good 10 years ago though.
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My memory is a bit rusty, but I think when I started studying in 1999 at PE Tech we got 50megs a month.

Kids nowadays have it lucky :D
 
Hambone I am pretty sure that you were at Rhodes when at least one of the trusty fights about the quota system and the fact that students couldn't buy "more internet" raged in various fora - particularly the forums. Before SEACOM the world of commodity internet access for South African universities was a pretty different game. At the time quite a few pundits were really in favour of the Stellenbosch approach which involved a rather costly SOCKS setup. The old wise and mysterious folks said noooo our Rhodes thinking about the internet is better. Rhodes put a lot of resources into providing internet on the basis that it did (everybody from the janitor to the vice-chancellor getting the same internet access system) and upset a lot of people who felt that their internet usage was more important than other peoples. There was also quite a bit of bootstrapping of the finances for getting the residential network going and eventually that meant that money which students where being charged for the luxury of having network access in res rooms could go into investing in capacity for SEACOM. I haven't comprehensively surveyed other universities since the arrival of SEACOM but certainly before SEACOM many institutions where either having ridiculously restrictive systems or a setup where the internet was not apportioned and ended up grinding to a halt. The Stellenbosch arrangement was generally liked and worked in a pre-SEACOM landscape. That landscape is no more.

Maaties decision to implement a particular way of dealing with the problem of scarcity was borne out of a particular ideology and entrenched that approach, it also has long term financial implications. By charging on a per megabyte basis all of the planning for internet provisioning was cast in that mould.
 
All I can say is that I'm very happy to be moving away from Stellenbosch at the end of the year. Something is terribly, terribly wrong when consumer products are cheaper than a universities'.
 
grim said:
When I was at TUKS we didn't pay for internet access but we were limited to 200MB/year, that was for IT students. Normal students got 100MB/year.

This was a good 10 years ago though.
Click to expand...
I left Tuks in 09. They still had it.
 
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