I've lived in Sheffield all my life so don't have any 'live in' experience of other cities but have travelled around a fair bit and Sheffield is a great city. The City has been renovated over the past 5-10 years and continues to be developed. It's a really nice place to be. it's not at all rough as people like to make out but like all cities their are worse areas you avoid. The night life is great with a huge selection of old pubs and more modern bars and clubs, something for every taste. The city centre is very nice with loads of shops cafes. There is also Meadow Hall (or Hell as we call it) which is a big shopping mall type place. its got loads to offer and the unis are great. Is it sheffield uni or Sheffield Hallam? both are good unis anyway. if you've got any more question i can try and answer
The connection at York is indeed 10Mb (presumably via JANET) and I regularly get 700-900K/s at off-peak times when I find a server fast enough to keep up - not bad for £60 per year. As already mentioned not all colleges are connected yet, however all the ones you'd actually want to be in have broadband. The only downside is that they do lock down the network pretty tight; 8080 is the only port which is left open, so gaming and most file sharing or IRC networks are out of the question. Whilst it is possible to use a port tunneller to get round this (provided you know somebody outside of the University who is willing to let you connect through them), this is technically against the university network rules.
Semi on-topic question here for those in uni-halls or with experience of: what are the policies on internal file sharing? From the rest of the thread it appears that a lot of external file sharing networks are banned, but for example can you set up your own FTPs, game servers, whatever internally?
youre lucky, last year i was in st. lawrence court (house f baby), no connection for me, ggrrrrr. tis a shame that they "lock down" the net at york. but im now in a loverly house, and quite happy with my 1mbit line. but they seemed to have done a good job getting most on campus accomm connected, so if anyone does come to york, they wont have to suffer like i did and traipse to a computer room to check my flippin email!
Stay away from UUJ it is the pits, I know I used to be a student there and then I worked there for a while - the main campus at Coleraine is far better, noth to study ata and work at. However which Uni is it in Liverpool? Uni of Liverpool, or John Moores? Both are good in their own ways - Uni of Liverpool has a very good rep for medicine and vetinary sciences etc. Liverpool is a far better place to be a student than Sheffeild or York - for a start it's not in Yorkshire so that's a major plus as well as the cost of living in Liverpool should be lower than York
At Bristol we had an internal DC hub, it hit around 6TB at max, and 1MB/s transfer speeds for everyone I think it's still going, limited to internal IPs only.
