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We campus technical staff had one of our semi regular meetings (and sausage sizzles) today, and talked of many things. One of the things is a favourite subject of mine, Student Internet Access.

When I started working at UWA in 2001, internet access cost 20c/MB of traffic, so your average YouTube video would cost about $3. Of course, YouTube wasn't around back then, but that's just an example. It's dropped over the years to the current 3.5c/MB ($38/Gb inc GST), which still isn't as cheap as your home connection, but it's a lot faster, and there's all sorts of caveats for things we're not being charged for, etc. 

Back in 1998, I was an exchange student in Canada, and lived on campus in residence and had free high speed access. In 2006, I was working for ITS and involved in setting up ResNet, because I wanted our students to have the same sort of access (if you live in one of the on-campus colleges, I'm responsible for your setup, but I don't look after it anymore, sorry :). That service has been pretty successful, and the residents manage to pump terabytes of data through it each month, and use it for gaming and all sorts of other fun stuff, but it's only for them. 

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes.

At the meeting today, it was confirmed that this year ITS has been arranging some funding, and the price for all students to access the Internet is dropping even more, and you're going to be getting a free quota of traffic, accumulating up to some figure. There's going to be some firm data going up soon, but we're all really excited about it. In Arts, we're expecting more students to use our labs and keep the place full of people, which should be fun.