Editor’s note: This is the first article in a weekly series investigating upgrades to Ohio University’s Internet.
Upcoming improvements to Ohio University’s network will speed up students’ Internet connections, allowing video to stream better and possibly only requiring users to log on to the wireless connection once a day.
The Office of Information Technology has worked steadily to make these improvements by 2014 with its four-year Next Generation Network upgrade, NextGen. Modernizing the university’s wired and wireless networks will allow for roaming, streaming and the ability to expand bandwidth in the future.
“When I arrived in 2007, I looked at the overall ability of the network to support a university the size and complexity of this one and compared it to other universities,” said Brice Bible, chief information officer. “It was pretty clear that we were way behind.”
The Ohio network has not been upgraded since the campus-wide installation of wireless Internet in 1998, the same year Google was founded. Operating on equipment that has not been improved since makes troubleshooting difficult, said Sean O’Malley, information technology communications manager.
“Sometimes when a computer starts to malfunction on the network, it will flood the connection with a bunch of garbage data, and our response time used to be measured in hours for a problem like that,” O’Malley said. “But with the new equipment, it can be measured in minutes.”
The project was split into two cycles, the first of which will enhance the network’s wired connection by replacing slow and outdated copper cables — linked between all campus buildings — with fiber cables, which OU has finished. The team is now in the process of updating switchboards in 145 buildings, 77 of which are already done.
The upgrade, which launched September 2009, is now five months ahead of schedule. The NextGen team completed all 42 residence halls during summer break. Work on Porter and Seigfred Halls is currently underway, and Alden Library was completed about six months ahead of schedule.
“Originally we were going to start wireless after we completely finished (the wiring upgrade), but when the money comes through, we’re planning on starting the two projects in tandem,” O’Malley said.
“Upgrading the university’s wired network will lay a foundation for the second half of the NextGen project — updating the network’s Wi-Fi. The wireless upgrade will allow students to roam from building to building without logging in to the Internet each time, a task which Bible said is students’ biggest complaint.
The second bond for NextGen is still pending, however, as upgrades to Wi-Fi were not expected to start until March 2013. More than $16 million was allocated to OIT for the first bond of the upgrade, and although the entire project has been approved, the second wave of funds must come through before initiating the next step — replacing wireless access points in all the buildings.
The NextGen team has not established a new expected date of completion for the project, but Bible said he expects to be entirely finished with the Athens campus well before the original estimated date of March 2014. All regional campuses will eventually receive new and improved tech equipment as well — work on OU-Southern is underway and OU-Chillicothe’s wired network upgrade is already complete.
“One of the challenges in Information Technology is that you’re always chasing the bottleneck,” Bible said. “Now, we are getting such great bandwidth on campus, our bottleneck will be the amount of Internet we can access.”
The new network will have 10 times the capacity of what is offered now, providing an opportunity to expand, likely improving the speed and reliability of the Ohio network.
oy311909@ohiou.edu
@ThePostCulture
