>> As a side note, a friend from several years ago attended University of Queensland, and at that time they implemented a program to provide only extremely limited volume of bandwidth to students which made geographically distributed collaboration much more difficlt.
As a UQ student from '04 to '07 I recall having those limits, and it wasn't that dissimilar to what you'd get on almost every ISP at the time (factoring in that it was there for tens of thousands of students so the quota itself was far lower than your monthly home one). I can't recall if the quota counted AARNet (sort of an AU uni peering arrangement) traffic or not but my stomach says it specifically excluded that, so you could pull as much data from other unis and research institutions as you wanted, which helped alleviate a bit of that pain. Certainly overseas was difficult back then though. Also, I didn't live on campus so it wasn't also my personal internet quota.
Quotas are still a thing here even now, though. My ISP gives me 250GB/mo for $50/mo. You can thank being on a desert island for part of the reason quotas exist. They're beginning to disappear but it's still a notable thing if the plan is unlimited quota.
e: split my comment for better context