Comment by bigstrat2003
2 days ago
Hubs were pretty common when I went to college (2003-2007), but not for the school's infrastructure. They would lend them to students because the rooms only had a single network port. Not sure how long that use case lasted; I imagine by now renovations have happened and rooms have multiple network ports (and the dorms would have wireless in any case).
You were one generation before me, I started college in 2007. By then it was all those super cheap little 4 port Netgear switches most people reading this have probably owned at some point. I don't remember us having official dorm wifi but we were allowed to have our own wireless routers, probably an IT nightmare by today's standards. I recall we also all got publicly routable IP4s.