Campus bandwidth soon to receive 40 per cent increase

Pete Yee

A HEALTHY DOSE OF FIBRE A recent boost in Internet usage on campus necessitated the bandwidth upgrade.

University of Alberta students will soon notice a jump in the speed of their wired Internet connection on campus, thanks to upgrades to the University's bandwidth.

The upgrade, which launches on Sunday, comes in response to a recent Internet slow-down perceived by students and staff approximately three weeks ago. Although the exact cause of the usage spike is unknown, its effects were clear.

“We're not really sure why or what happened. Things are back to normal now, but maybe a lot of people just wanted to be watching videos at a certain time or something cool was happening on the Internet. Maybe there was a virus spewing content,” said Jonathan Schaeffer, vice-provost of information technology at the U of A.

Buying bandwidth, Schaeffer explained is always tricky, especially for institutions with such variable usage as the University. A balance must be struck between frugality and having enough bandwidth to spare. The upgrade will bring the University's bandwidth to 700 megabits per second from 500 — an approximately 40 per cent increase.

“The University has historical trends about its network usage, and then buys connectivity to accommodate that use with a generous safety margin,” Schaeffer explained.

“People were experiencing slowness,” he acknowledged.

Connection problems have not yet caught up with campus wireless users, who were not affected by the recent slow-down, but Schaeffer also admitted that problems in that department could arise as Internet files becomes bigger and usage more commonplace.

“Wireless usage is certainly on the increase. We're not having any problems now, but somewhere down the road, we might have to increase wireless capacity as well,” he said.