UKC was on Janet so it shouldn’t have been so terrible compared to other institutions. One of the biggest issues back then was people running remote X sessions on shared departmental machines so everything would grind to a halt at the start of lessons (unless you knew how to use Blackbox etc). And all the best machines were reserved for multimedia students.

Late 1990's Comp Sci department?

A whole slew of people would have been getting great speeds from a dedicated fibre link or two .. just not the open day labs.

First rule of bandwidth club.