Circa 2002, Penn State limited each on-campus student connection to (my memory is fuzzy so don't hold me to exact numbers) 1.5GB combined upload and download per week. But, anything transferred within the Penn State network did not count towards the cap. This is where I should say that Penn State has 12+ campuses spread throughout the entire state of Pennsylvania so we could transfer stuff between Erie, PA and State College, PA for no penalty.

This lead to the rise of an internal Direct Connect network that allowed students to form our own internal file sharing network that was approximately functionally equivalent to Napster and the like.

This also lead to the complete and total network saturation of some parts the dorms where we clearly had clusters of students trying to get their download on. It's just really hard to try to understand how people will respond to available incentives; not just here but in all areas of life.