NU suffers internet woes

With more students living on campus and changing computer usage, the network bandwidth at Norwich has once again reached it maximum usage point, according to the director of systems and architecture. 

"The problem with the internet is we have reached the current capacity that we have with our subscriber," said Perley Dexter, director of systems and architecture. "We have an internet service provider just like any home user. Every few years that reaches capacity and that's where we are now." 

Changing computer uses are stressing the system.

"People trying to get their X-Boxes on to play games, social media like Facebook which uses one-third of Norwich's internet traffic, cause the changes," Dexter said. "So when you introduce something like that and then media for example, YouTube, all these things that students are using as social media in their dorm instead of subscribing to like a cable TV package, it just really hits the bandwidth." 

The school doubled its bandwidth three years ago and it has since then reached capacity. The bandwidth is dependent on what is provided by the school's internet service provider. 

"We started to notice a problem at the end of last semester and we started to work on a solution, the problem is that oftentimes we are limited by our provider. TDS, where we buy our internet from, increased their infrastructure which allowed us to double ours," Dexter said. "We are looking to make an improvement to that bandwidth but it really comes down to cost, we have a couple of firewall upgrades to make and we have to buy more bandwidth from TDS." 

Many students try to blame the Cisco Network Admission Control Agent (NAC) for the internet being so slow, but Dexter said that's not the case.  

"The NAC agent is a control of who can get on the network. Once you are on the network the NAC agent doesn't do anything. Once it's running the NAC agent does not control bandwidth," Dexter said. 

"What we do have for problems is the number of users, so not only are people using more types of bandwidth, but we have more students on campus than we have ever had before. When you add these people and you don't add the capacity to go with it you suffer problems," Dexter said. 

"It's really fast generally in the morning, it's a little bit faster because students are still sleeping (and) some facility have not come in yet. At noon, it's usually very slow because the people who just got out of lunch or haven't gone to lunch or the facility are in their offices, everybody is hitting the internet at that time," Dexter said. 

"If students spent less time on Facebook and YouTube, this would actually reduce traffic on the internet. Some other things we are looking to do is perhaps in the future if we were to have certain movies or television programs or video on demand that we had here on campus that students could pull down and use," Dexter said.