Introduction

Your free Student Internet Access account has been designed to help enhance your study experience. When you enrol at the University of Queensland, UQconnect provides you with a sizeable monthly download quota allowance to use on-campus and at home through a free Dial-up connection. Our Internet access system gives you super fast speeds. Below you can find out how your download quota works.

About your Download Quota

Your free Student Internet Access account includes a download quota allowance of 400MB (150MB on the free ICTE student account) per calendar month. Your allowance will be refreshed on the 1st of every month and any unused portion from the previous month will be removed from your account. 

Access
Your download quota allowance is used whenever you access the Internet through your free Student Internet Access account, or on-campus when you are required to authenticate (such as via the wireless network or in computer labs).

Need more download quota?
If you use all of your free download allowance, you can purchase additional download. N.B. If you are a postgraduate research student, please refer to your School administrator to access additional download.

Check your download quota
You can check your download allowance balance at the Quota Checking Page in my.UQ.  Access to this page requires that you authenticate with your Student Internet Access username (e.g. s1234567) and password.

Some important points to note:

• After the completion of a download, there might be a short delay before your allowance is updated
• There might be a delay before you are refused further downloads
• You are responsible for managing your own download allowance and ensuring that it does not drop to below zero
• Always remember to log out at the end of your Internet session

Using the student uq.edu.au server

Restrictions apply to FTP and HTTP access from login sessions on student.uq.edu.au. The commonly used programs on student.uq.edu.au whose use are affected are ftp, ncftp and lynx. It is not possible to connect directly to charged sites via FTP or HTTP using these programs. Direct connections to non-charged sites will not be affected. Downloads from charged sites are possible, but must be done via the UQ web proxy servers. The ftp and ncftp programs do not support fetches via these proxies. However lynx will fetch FTP or HTTP objects via web proxies. The wget program is an alternative. If you download anything from charged sites on student.uq.edu.au your quota will be deducted accordingly.

How this applies to Residential College Networks

The Internet Download Quota system applies to network users at the following UQ Residential Colleges:

• St John's College
• Duchesne College

If you reside in a college that is not listed above then your Internet access will be handled by the old download quota management system. If this applies to you, then you need to check your downloads through a different web page (download-quota.uq.edu.au). College users should configure their browsers to use the standard UQ autoproxy. Find out more about how to configure these settings here. Access to the UQ proxy servers from the above college networks requires "Proxy Authentication". When you first attempt to access an off-net site via the proxy, your browser will pop up a window with a message along the lines of "Proxy authentication required for Squid proxy-caching web server at http-proxy.uq.edu.au:80" or "You need a password to access this proxy". You are required to enter your Student Internet Access account username (e.g. s1234567) and password. You may be prompted a second time to enter your Student Internet Access account username and password, though it may occur at an apparently random time later. This is because there are in fact two UQ proxy servers and under certain circumstances your browser may switch over to the other proxy. Simply enter your Student Internet Access account username and password again. After the second time, you should not have to enter your password again until either you restart the browser or change your password.

Suggestions on How to Avoid Exhausting your Allowance

With University research becoming ever more dependent on online materials, we understand that at times it can be difficult to stay within your download quota. Nonetheless some of you may stray over the 400MB limit, although if you do, you will still have access to all UQ sites.

• Check your download quota regularly in my.UQ regularly. Keep in mind that there is a delay between when a download completes and when it is accounted to your allowance
• Do not use your free Student Internet Access account for non-academic use.  The download quota included with this service, is designed solely to support your study in accordance with the Terms and Conditions of usage
• Do not share your Internet access with anyone else or divulge your password to anyone else.  Your are responsible for ensuring the security of this information
• "Think before you click." Be aware of whether the site you are going to is on-net or off-net. Consider the likely size of an item before you download it. Some items are obviously large and will quickly exhaust your allowance. If you begin a download and then decide you didn't really need it, hit the "stop" button
• If you struggle to stay within your quota you may want to consider configuring your browser so that images are not automatically loaded
• Take full advantage of your local cache by configuring your browser save in memory sites that your regularly visit

Questions and Answers

What happens if I run out of download quota?
If you run out of download quota, UQconnect offer you the option to purchase additional download quota.  Postgraduate students will need to speak with their school's administrator about additional downloads.
 

What is the Traffic Management system?
The Traffic Management and Internet access system is software that has been developed to help manage your download quota. When you login via login.uq.edu.au, you are accessing the system. To find out more about the system go here, or read the step-by-step guide.

Why can't I use MSN Messenger or online banking?
Your download quota for your free Student Internet Access account, uses a Private IP address. Some Internet services, such as MSN Messenger and online banking, do not like this type of IP address. If you would like to use these services you will need to purchase a private Dial-up or ADSL Broadband service.

Do I have a time quota?
When you use your free Student Internet Access account through Dial-up, you have a maximum connection duration of 4 hours.

Does the download quota system apply to E-mail?
This system does not apply to your email on the student.uq.edu.au server. However, if you read your email using a web-based system, such as hotmail.com or yahoo.com, then any downloads will be accounted against your quota allowance.

My course might require me to make large downloads from charged sites. What am I supposed to do?
You should consider talking to your lecturer/supervisor, as they may be willing to provide the class with extra download allowance.  Alternatively, UQconnect offer you the option to purchase additional download quota.