Indeed, for a while with Google there have been nominal ingress quota limits of (iirc) 750 GB per day.

It seems that in the context of research universities there may be a mismatch in communication and use of "unlimited". Google said something it didn't mean, then eventually realises and claws it back.

This has happened twice in a few weeks - once for "forever" on free G Suite, and now with "unlimited" for universities.

I'm surprised that they don't get more marketing collateral for selling the credibility of G Suite to enterprise clients from being able to talk about case studies like storing and processing multi dimensional time-series medical imaging data on their storage platform as a way to say "we're ready for your data, and you can feel good while you pay us, as we support this great research"...

Clearly the revenue push has arrived for these services. 100 TB per institution isn't really a lot when you consider research data, but might be more tenable if you consider purely students with the odd slideshow and video. Unfortunately this makes life easier for the less scientifically rigorous fields of study that make a few slide decks, rather than the ones where a student might collect a few TB of data in an hour or two.

A service could support unlimited data by throttling the upload speed, and the more you upload, the slower it gets. Then, they could offer paid accounts that increased the speed.

I was told by an SRE on Drive that the unlimited offer was legit because the at the rate you could upload data to drive the costs were still far bellow the bill.

Of course that seemed wrong because if you are uploading for years $5 a month isn't going to keep covering all of that storage. I imagine that part of this assumption that storage costs would keep dropping and presumably this isn't happening as quickly as originally predicted.

Unlimited coffee is also limited by the amount of pee you can hold in your bladder.