Written by Kylie Akins
With the beginning of this school year came an occasionally difficult Internet situation, causing students to wonder whether this will be the standard for the rest of the semester.
Over the past weeks, the campus’s Internet has been down for a total of two and a half hours, involving two separate server crashes. Students quickly noticed the unavailability.
Freshman Levi Denton was working on a research paper in the library when the servers crashed.
“It kind of put me behind my schedule because I had my day all planned out,” Denton said. “It put me behind on other stuff, and I had to cancel some things. It really did affect me. It just happens.”
Between the crashes and sporadically unreliable loading times, some students’ schoolwork suffered; however, frustration seemed to be the only consequence of the infrequent Internet problems.
“I had a few problems with it because we have to submit lab reports online,” junior Kelley Freeman said. “But our teachers were very understanding and pushed back our deadlines.”
Keith Cronk, Harding vice president of Information Systems and Technology, said students should not be too concerned about the two short server crashes.
“They brought [the servers] back up again, and they’re working fine,” Cronk said. “That’s the confusing thing. It’s good that they’re back up, but it’s not good that we don’t know why yet. But we’ll work it out.”
One of the three domain name servers the Harding network operates is presently being serviced. Cronk explained that the first server crash may have been related to the increased amount of malware viruses brought in every year at the beginning of the fall semester.
AT&T acts as Harding’s Internet provider, currently supplying a 150 megabits per second connection, a 33 percent increase from last year. Fifty megabits are dedicated to academic use, including the departmental buildings and library, and 100 are set apart for dorm usage, which Cronk said is more than enough.
“Why is the Internet slow sometimes?” Cronk said. “Because we have dorms that are heavy users of the Internet. It’s not like at home with a DSL connection and one or two people attached. If 300 people all of the sudden decide to watch something from last night on Hulu, that’s really what is eating up bandwidth: video. And it will continue to do so.”
Cronk, an avid fan of ESPN 360 online, said that online TV has become very popular over the past few years, replacing the strain low-quality YouTube once had on the Harding Internet with high-quality TV shows. The slower speed of the Internet at peak times during the day, typically 4 p.m. and between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m., is not caused by the record enrollment this year, Cronk said, but a changing usage pattern focusing primarily around high-quality videos.
Cronk also attributes the increased usage of bandwidth to the multiple devices most students connect to their Internet hook-up.
“Three years ago, people typically came and plugged in one device to the orange jack,” Cronk said. “But we have rooms now that are going up to six devices to the one connection. It’s not just 2800 connections. It’s 2800 times the number of things people bring.”
Cronk emphasized that the megabits are split now between the academic and social Internet, so the educational aspect, the primary reason for Harding’s Internet, is effectively protected.
“What students want to hear is ‘We have more bandwidth, and you’ll have instantaneous response for everything you’ll want to do,'” Cronk said. “And I’m all for that, but we can’t do that right now. It’s just no balance between keeping the costs where they are, making sure the main reason we’re here has been achieved, and allowing the social side.”
