I must be undead here in that case.....

AOL wasn't allowed to purchase CompuServe directly, UUNET (really MCI or MFS, can't remember who owned UUNET at the time) bought it then carved off the consumer level accounts and sold it to AOL. Part of the deal was AOL transferred all the business service accounts and it's dial-up pops to UUNET and they got merged in with the dial-up pops from CS and the existing UUDIAL network. Then both systems leased POPs access back from UUNET. After that point most multi-state dial-up ISPs where either reselling UUNET or SPRINT dial pop access and where just content providers rather then actuall ISPs.

You want university provided high speed internet - abide by their rules. If you don't - go pay for a wireless data plan.

Cisco WAAS units are what you are looking for. They will do network packet optimizations as well as network caching. It keeps a hash database of the largest possible chunks of data, it sends the hashes first - if it gets a hit in the remote devices database it doesn't have to send all the data. Very effective when it works.

They can also serve as local print servers.