Research activity is the main cause of a more than seven-fold increase in data travelling to and from the University of Otago's network.
According to the university's annual report, data travelling to and from its network climbed from 693 terabytes (a terabyte is a million megabytes) in 2015 to 5078 terabytes last year.
To put that into perspective, 5078 terabytes would store more than 550 years of video and close to 10,000 years of music.
Information technology services director Mike Harte said the roll-out of a new network, computer and storage infrastructure had allowed much faster speeds.
This had made it easier and faster for researchers to send and receive large files from outside the university's network, Mr Harte said.
The new network's ability to handle higher speeds and greater amounts of data had also improved internet access in general for students and staff.
Much of the increased bandwidth was researchers taking advantage of supercomputers as part of New Zealand eScience Infrastructure (NeSI).
During the past 14 months, more than 700 terabytes of research data - making up almost 70 million files - had been transferred using the service, at speeds approaching six gigabits a second at times.
The amount of data going to and from the university was expected to continue to climb.
''We have increased the network bandwidth available for general internet use in the past few weeks and we continually monitor demand.''
ITS systems services manager and NeSI site manager David Maclaurin said that in the past, Otago's network had not been keeping pace with the massive amount of research data the university was generating.
This meant some researchers were resorting to downloading data on to external hard drives then couriering them to the data's destination because that was quicker than using the network, Mr Maclaurin said.
To create a faster network, the ITS team started doing its own research and discovered a combination of hardware and software called a Science DMZ.
A Science DMZ was specifically designed to let large amounts of research data flow in and out of a network with the least obstructions possible, at the highest speeds possible.
Now, images direct from an MRI scanner in Dunedin could reach a research lab in the United States in well under three minutes if needed, and researchers no longer needed to resort to couriering hard drives.
