Written by John Mark Adkison
Harding students were not in a jolly mood at the start of this holiday season as they tried in vain to access the Internet before the Thanksgiving break. Internet connection across campus was slow and oftentimes dead for students, which affected their studies in this work-heavy time at the end of the semester.”There was a two-day period before break (Tuesday and Wednesday), where things were exceedingly bad,” said Keith Cronk, vice president for Harding’s Information Systems and Technology department. “We discovered that one of the packet-shaping devices had reset itself to a much lower setting. This effectively throttled Internet access.”According to Cronk, the packet shaping device, which helps manage network traffic for online users, corrected itself after a reboot.”We still do not know why it did this, but technology is like that sometimes,” said Cronk. “It had never done that before, nor since. But that would go a long way to explaining the worse performance on those two days.”But even with this correction, IS&T is still looking for ways to improve connection and speed. Harding’s Internet is provided through AT&T, which gives the university the amount of bandwidth, the maximum speed of data transfer for the Internet, it has now.Cronk said that Harding spoke with AT&T to figure out a solution to the slow connection before Thanksgiving break. Harding’s current bandwidth is 150 megabits per second (mbps), but Cronk said he is asking AT&T for 250 mbps.”[AT&T] suggested a number of things we could do to try and improve our bandwidth situation,” Cronk said. “The real answer is still the need for more bandwidth. They were not able to give us a clear date for the installation of the additional bandwidth, other than mid-December.”Cronk said a positive solution that has worked out were changes suggested by AT&T to adjust some of the Internet settings, which made the settings higher than the current bandwidth.”We did this and started to see that we were able to access more than the 150 mbps,” Cronk said.Another solution IS&T is looking at is to restrict until January the usage of entertainment sites such as Hulu and Netflix, which take up a great deal of bandwidth and therefore cause slower access. IS&T has been in talks with the SA about how students might react to this development.”I talked to the SA about the current Internet condition, and we decided we were going to talk to as many people as possible to see if they would be ready to give up Hulu [until January],” said senior Chris Ngu, the SA’s IT representative. “Most of the people we asked said they didn’t care and that they wanted to be able to do homework.”With finals coming close and students needing to access the Internet more and more for studying, Cronk said that IS&T is looking at restricting Hulu and Netflix for the last few weeks of the semester if the problems are not resolved.”We want to wait and see if the changes that have been implemented help to the point where it is not necessary to block sites like Hulu or Netflix,” Cronk said. “If things are better over the next few days, we may not have to do that. I guess you can say we are in a holding pattern in that regard to blocking certain sites. But if it means that for the next couple of weeks students were able to complete their academic work with less disruption, then it is something we would do.”News editor Kylie Akins contributed to this report.
