The University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) is offering its students data for education purposes through its Data Access programme, which opens from today in 2022.

This programme offers said students up to 40GB per months, but, like many services provides, this is split between data that can be used at any time and data for later hours at night.

“Wits is providing students with data to access services required for their online learning requirements. This will be available via their preferred service provider from this list: [Cell C], MTN, Telkom, and Vodacom. The data offering has a maximum data usage of 20 Gb per month anytime data and 20 Gb night time data via one service provider only,” the Wits website reads.

“To make use of these services, each student must ensure they have filled in the ‘Maintain Mobile Data Number’ form on https://self-service.wits.ac.za and provide the Cell Number on which they would like the data provided. Data is allocated once a month, using the number saved on the portal on the morning of the first Tuesday of the month. Students should allow four to five working days thereafter for the data to load.”

There is some caveats to this allocation of data, however, such as the fact that it can only be used by way of the Wits DataBundle VPN. This VPN – Virtual Private Network – ensures that the data can only be used on links approved by the university with a list of those links and sites available in this PDF.

Links supported by the VPN will either needed to be visited using alternative data or by contacting a course lecturer.

Students are encouraged to visit the Data Access landing page available here which contains guides for acquiring the data as well as tips to make it go as far as possible such as using data saver modes on phones, mobile browsers that are designed to use less data, turning off background network use and more.

[Image – tomekwalecki on Pixabay]