The Residence Hall Network is paid by your rent payments and is considered one of the services that are included with your housing fees. That is basically just the standard monthly charge for your phone line. You can use the phone line to access dial-up Internet access provided by the University, but you really want to use the Ethernet connection because even with the cap, it should be faster than what modems allow. I'd rather pay for better service. We are actively investigating this as a possibility.
Many students are willing to pay more to be able to get more bandwidth.
To make that possible, we have to develop effective billing systems and mechanisms and make sure we are able to provide the level of service that people are willing to pay for. Currently we do not have the mechanism in place to gauge and charge students based on their usage. Residential Computing does not maintain the entire campus network, we only work with the portion of the network that connects the residence halls and University housing. We get the connection to the rest of the University and the Internet through the campus network. Since they are the office that controls the network and pays for the connection to the Internet, they feel they need to cap residence hall bandwidth to control their costs.