A top IT school in Vietnam limits students’ Google storage to 500MB, less than Gmail’s early days nearly 20 years ago.

In February 2021, Google announced a new policy for Google accounts for education (also known as G Suite for Education). Specifically, instead of unlimited storage like before, Google will limit the storage capacity to 100TB/school to share for all students.

This has forced many universities in Vietnam, which mainly use G Suite for Education as an email platform for students, forced to introduce measures to limit storage capacity.

Most recently, FPT University sent an email to students, announcing that it would limit students’ storage capacity to 500MB, and disable Google Photo and Google Drive services. Students are advised to transfer personal data to another storage service or download it to a computer.

“Since May 2, 2022, the IT Department has received a notice from Google about the change in the policy of providing free Email to educational institutions globally, including FPT Education.

The policy applied starting July 2022 will no longer be free for all educational institutions globally.

The IT Department would like to inform all students of the school that from July 2022 onwards, it intends to implement the policy of providing each email [email protected] a 500MB storage space and stop providing 2 Google services. Photos and Google Drive.”, Email sent by FPT University to all students.

Email sent by FPT University’s IT Department to students

On social networks, some users, including students studying at FPT University, think that the reduction to 500MB is too little, especially given the nature of IT students who often have to use it. email to send exercises, software source code, textbooks…

A fun comparison: when Google launched Gmail in 2004, the service offered users up to 1GB of free storage. Thus, the 500MB provided by FPT University is only half of what it was nearly 20 years ago, not to mention the file size in 2022 is also much larger than 2004.

The G Suite for Education (now Google Workspace for Education Fundamentals) service plan with 100TB of storage is completely free for eligible educational institutions. Schools can completely upgrade to the Google Workspace for Education Plus plan to get more benefits, which includes upgrading the storage capacity to 20GB/student, in addition to the shared 100TB. However, Google does not publicly announce the price of this package, but only “closed quotation” with a representative of the school.

Google Education Packages

It is known that a number of universities in Vietnam have gradually shifted to other cloud storage services. One of them is Hanoi University of Science and Technology, currently using Microsoft’s email service and OneDrive storage with a capacity of 1TB, with an Office 365 package.

According to the statistics of Dr. Le Truong Tung, Chairman of the Board of Directors of FPT University, published in mid-2021, FPT University has the 13th highest tuition fee in Vietnam with a tuition fee of 25.3 million VND/term. Topping this ranking is VinUni University with a tuition fee of 406 million VND/term.