Using the Internet

Internet data traffic is charged to the School for PCs and servers within the EIE buildings. This is both for downloads to your PC and for uploads from our PCs and servers.

The Internet is provided to help in your work and research.

You should not use it for listening to the radio, watching news feeds or for downloading MP3 files, movies and software that you do not need in your work.

There are also some ways to reduce the cost to the School:

• Internet traffic between Universities in Sydney is free.
  
• Traffic within the University is free.
  
• Internet traffic to sites within Australia costs much less than for overseas. The saving is about 75%, so if you want to download something you should choose a local site. Often if you install a program like Netscape it will default to a homepage that is overseas.
  If you change the homepage preference to "blank" or something like www.usyd.edu.au the program will load quicker and reduce costs.
  
• You should not install server programs on your PC, and you should not leave programs like ICQ and IRC running if you're not using them.
  
• If you want to install some software you should try to find it within the University first through the helpdesk.usyd.edu.au pages, then try the EIE Downloads Resources Page where the first and best selection is the AARNET Mirror Site . Almost all the useful software can be found on the AARNET mirror server, and it costs a lot less to access than servers overseas. mirror.aarnet is also very fast compared to most other servers.
  
  Happy browsing