This reminds of the LAN we had in college. We used to use the software DC++ and then students shared the files that they had downloaded. You could access almost any file at 100MBPS.Someone was sure to download the latest episode of what you wanted to watch. If someone did not, then you went on the internet. Sometimes it was fast to download the file via LAN, than to transfer a file from pen drive to the computer.
Purdue? Purdue still has a strong community based of DC++. People have servers sharing 50+ terabytes of data, with designated release managers and bots to auto download new tv shows, etc.
I am from India, my college had decent internet speed but slower Internet speeds(around 1MBPs when it was fast), hence the use of DC++. 100MBPS on lan was pretty fun. This was in 2011.
Its interesting to know that Purdue has strong DC++ community, also auto bots is something that I did not know about in college :) From what I have heard from my US friends is that the rules are much more stringent in US about file sharing and colleges enforce it much more strongly.
DCgate/Dtella, created by Purdue students, merged DC and IRC (not sure how chat is handled by the newer Dtella).
Searches were broadcast over IRC. I set up a bot to scrape the searches and display them in real time using a Comet (pre-WebSocket era!) powered website. From the IP that requested the search, you could determine the dormitory they were in. One IP kept searching for stuff like "clown porn". It was wonderfully entertaining.
I forget what the monthly bandwidth quota for non-campus traffic was. Perhaps 50 or 100 GB? Traffic to other campus nodes was "free" and almost guaranteed to speed along at 100 Mbps.
I implemented the Tiger hash (used by DC clients) in MMX/SSE2 assembly because it begs for 64-bit integer types. SSE was able to provide a ~2x speedup over regular code, even though I just used SSE for 64-bit types and didn't do any real SIMD. Of course, simply building the DC client for x86_64 provided an even greater speedup but I was stuck with a 32-bit machine at the time. :)
We had this going at UBC as well. Since it was all internal LAN traffic, it didn't count against the 7 GB / day upload / download quota which was really tight if you like HD content.
There was one at Cambridge as well. Never bothering using it, but I could see the appeal:
* My college limited external traffic to 8GB per 10 day period (this was after we negotiated an increase in 2011). After that, it was a £0.25/GB charge plus throttling (<128Kbps after 15GB usage)
* Having an IP address with the reverse DNS entry of <studentID>.<college>.cam.ac.uk made P2P for TV/movies etc. a poor idea (services like MegaUpload were popular though, as was the ad-hoc sharing of files locally)
This entire thing was run by students.