Internet Access
Student access to the Internet varies throughout the University depending to some extent on whether you are an undergraduate or postgraduate, your faculty and even your department. In general postgraduates have substantially greater access to the Internet than undergraduates.
The student Internet quota applies to general access labs such as those at Student IT or Percy Baxter, as well as connections via both the wireless and SPIN network.
When you try to access a site that is external to the University for the first time in a computer session you will be prompted for your username/password. This is the same as in the University central email account and some Faculty / Department Labs. Once you have been authenticated, all your subsequent downloads in that session are logged and the volume of data recorded.
There is a 50Mb per week download limit for undergraduates and 175Mb per week download limit for postgraduates. This quota applies to data downloaded from websites outside the University. If you access graphic-rich pages on external websites or download large files you may rapidly use up your quota. Once you have exceeded your quota you will be prevented from accessing external sites for up to a week. All quotas are re-set after midnight each Monday. Even though you may have lost your access to external sites you will still have unlimited access to University websites.
Please note that your internet web quota is not time-based. It is a measure of all the information from external sites (text, images, video, files etc) that is displayed on your screen, played on your computer or downloaded to your computer.
Some faculties such as Engineering have their own Internet quota system in place that has different download limits to the central Student Internet Quota System.
Student IT staff or other student support staff on-campus cannot reset Internet quotas.
In addition, in Student IT facilities you can only access the Internet for web browsing (HTTP) and basic file transfer (FTP). This means that remote logins (TELNET), non-web email (POP, IMAP, SMTP) and chat programs (MSN), etc. will not work. You can however use TELNET and other services to sites within the University. Similar restrictions may apply in other labs on-campus.