Last week, the SXU community experienced a temporary collapse of the university’s wireless Internet.
While the Internet connection was eventually restored, the time it was down did cause the resident students some grief. Students on campus while the Internet was down were unable to access their emails, Blackboard, or CLAWS.
This apparent lack of Internet made common, seemingly everyday tasks like turning in assignments electronically or using the web to work on homework.
“I had to submit an assignment on Blackboard and I was docked a grade for being forced [by the lack of internet connection] to turn it in late.” Said Kristen Mabry, a first-year psychology major.
John Frederickson, a junior biology major, had a similar complaint.
“I tried to get my home online and I couldn’t, so I had to use my phone instead.” Said Frederickson.
With the Internet unavailable, students also found it hard to print papers using the wireless printing.
“It took me an hour to print a paper using webprint, then when I had to print it from my email, my email wouldn’t open.” Romisha Taylor, a senior psych major. “It was a long morning.”
Campus Information Resources and Technologies are trying to prevent similar crashes in the future.
SXU is currently serviced by a network that runs at a speed of 100 Megabits per second (Mbit/s.) Campus IRT hopes to upgrade the network to 250 Mbits/s before next semester starts.
“We are optimistic that it will be up by January term,” said Dan Lichter, Director of Data and Network Infrastructure.
The crashes that occurred last week in particular were caused by problems with routing Internet traffic between the Campus and its two service providers AT&T and ICN.
“Numerous changes had occurred behind the scenes in their outside telecommunications environments that led to all of our return traffic from the Internet being forced through a singe return carrier as opposed to load sharing between out two providers,” said Brian Goebel, Network Engineer. “This lead to connection issues and an overall slower internet connection experience to the end-user.”
Campus IRT hopes to keep increasing the bandwidth as funding allows with 500 Mbit/s being the goal.
“In order to improve the end-user Internet experience now and into the future, we have a major upgrade that is nearing completion. This upgrade will effectively quintuple our available Internet bandwidth campus wide so as to put an end to the slow and unresponsive wireless Internet we have been dealing with in the past.” Said Goebel.
Overall, IRT are optimistic about being able to avoid future outages.
“Moving forward, as we repair and upgrade from previous outages, it becomes unlikely for a similar outage to occur again.” Said Goebel. “Given the nature of technology, however, and the fact that we must rely on many outside company services, we simply cannot guarantee there will never be another outage. Despite that, we are committed to improving our infrastructure and capabilities to further lessen the chance and/or impact of future problems.”