In The News

January 30, 2003

Internet service upgrade doubles bandwidth on Norwich campus

By Jason Leonard
Norwich Guidon Staff Writer
and William Knox
Norwich Guidon Managing Editor

Aaron Sylvia, a student at Norwich University, tried to get on instant messenger one day and the computer wouldn't connect him to the Internet.

Many Norwich students and faculty have found that accessing the Internet on campus can be very difficult. Many claim that the Internet connection is frequently so slow that students have trouble carrying out necessary academic and professional work.

"A lot of the time when you try to get onto instant messenger, or just look at your e-mail, you can't do it," said Aaron Sylvia, a junior civil engineering major, form Bristol, RI. "The speed of the Internet access is a real big problem that I think the school needs to take action on."

It's not only the students who have experienced problems with the Internet, but the faculty and staff, as well.

"It's very frustrating," said Scott Page, an assistant professor of biology. "Sometimes when I would go online to look at government databases, I would hit search and the computer would take sometimes 10 minutes just to logon to the page."

In an attempt to increase the speed with which individuals may access the Internet on campus, Norwich University administrators are upgrading the school's bandwidth from 6 megabits to 12, according to the campus IT Newsletter.

Philip Susmann, the vice president for technology and strategic partnerships at Norwich, is the budget authority for the expenditure on the Internet. According to Susmann, his job is to meet the student's needs in terms of the Internet service, something, he said, the school is not currently doing.

"I believe that our connectivity today is unacceptable," Susmann said. "That's why we came to the decision to make the upgrade. We feel that the connectivity for the resident students at Norwich was unacceptable, and we needed to do something about it."

According to Susmann, the new upgrade to the bandwidth will be finished by Friday, Jan. 31.

"We were hoping that the upgrade would be in place prior to the return of the students from Christmas break," Susmann said. "Unfortunately, the companies that provide the upgrading services couldn't get them here."

In addition to increasing the bandwidth coming into the school, Susmann and his colleagues have taken steps to control how the bandwidth will be used. Steps that, Susmann said, will give priority to some Internet services, while limiting others.

According to Susmann, they have determined that a lot of the Internet traffic they were seeing was file downloads by students. To combat this, Norwich added to their system a filtering agent called Packetere.

Packetere is a system that prioritizes bandwidth based upon need and packet content, according to an independent IT specialist. Susmann said it was used at Norwich as part of a strategy to manage the bandwidth so that the network could be used at its greatest capabilities.

"This allows you to shape the bandwidth," Susmann said. "In other words, it allows only a certain amount of megabytes to go towards student downloading. This allows for the people who are doing just Internet searches not to get slow connectivity because of downloads."

Gail Poitras, Norwich University director of academic computing, claims also to have noticed a positive difference since Packetere was installed.

"As a member on the faculty side, we have experienced slowness in the past," Poitras said. "There are some times when it's hard to search, or download a file. With the installation of the Packetere the connection seems to have improved."

Some highly knowledgeable students, however, disagree.

Louis R. Gordner, 20, is a sophomore computer science major from Indianapolis, Indiana, who is also minoring in information assurance. He is also a professional IT specialist with professional clients back home in Indiana.

Gordner said he believes that Packetere has had the opposite effect on the Norwich system and is in reality limiting the abilities of the system.

"What this means is that you have to analyze every piece of data that goes through the trunk," according to Gordner. "The problem is, there are not a lot of machines out there that can't handle analyzing that much data fast enough to not slow down the pipe. When that system was installed, the bandwidth slowed down noticeably."

According to Gordner, there is a better way. "What I have done, when setting up similar systems, is put in quality of service (QOS) rules that are designed to prioritize bandwidth not on packet content, but based on the port address," Gordner said.

Port address refers to the system used by computers to determine the nature of incoming data, whether it is e-mail, file transfer protocol (FTP), or the hyper-text transfer protocol (http) programming language used on the Internet. According to Gordner, this style of system allows the administrator to give Internet and e-mail first priority, and then SSH and FTP and everything else at much higher speeds.

"The reason that analysis doesn't take much bandwidth is because it's on the address that the incoming data-packet has," Gordner said. "All you're doing is reading the packet header; you don't have to actually analyze the content of the packet. You only have to look at six bits of data as opposed to 156 bits of data per look."

Such a system would allow much slower and less costly machines to operate than does Packetere, according to Gordner. Such a program, he said, could be administered at Norwich by an average desktop PC, "without batting an eye."

"You could build a box to run it for 600 bucks," Gordner said.

This fall, after Norwich purchased the Packetere, Susmann acknowledged there were still some noticeable problems with the Internet service on campus.

"We realized there was still a demand for more bandwidth beyond simply allocating a small amount of megabytes for downloads," Susan said. "That's why we're doubling the bandwidth, so that students can do what they need to do on the Internet."

In terms of service, some people claim that Norwich is behind many other New England schools.

"I think that we're playing catch-up to other universities," said Brad Roy, a junior architecture major from Keene, NH. "I talk to my friends who go to schools like UNH and Syracuse, and they say they don't have any problems with their Internet. I think if we can catch up, that will be great."

Gordner said he couldn't understand why service at Norwich was so troublesome in comparison to other universities, when there is a full-time staff to run it.

"We got a whole office of people who are administrating a network of roughly a thousand computers," Gordner said. "A network similar to ours, hosting roughly 2000 to 3000 students at Bowdoin college up in Maine, is completely run by students and has the best up-time, reliability and service of any network in the country."

Gordner said he believed that student administration would be a solution to a lot of the problems Norwich is currently facing with its network.

"Our IA program is the top in the country," Gordner said. "Our computer science, while not the best in the country, is definitely not hurting. In terms of students who would be capable of handling the network on this campus, we've got it. Hands-down, we have it."

According to Gordner, it would take only 15 people "at the most" to run a network

"And that's a high end estimate," Gordner said. "Honestly, if you set up a network right, you shouldn't have to administrate it more than once a month. If you've got 10 people who are capable of doing it any hour of the day whenever school is in session, that's more than sufficient to get the job done."

According to Gordner, the students could run the network even during the yearly breaks. During times when school is not in session, Gordner said that a properly configured network could be setup for remote administration.

"When the students go home during the breaks, they could login from wherever they are in the world and administrate the network from there," Gordner said. "If you set it up right."

According to Susmann, technology will always keep getting better, so there will never be a point where the university won't have worry about upgrading its computer systems.

"Eventually we're going to have to get more bandwidth," Susmann said. "The type of media that we're using is increasing in density. The files we're downloading and transmitting these days take a lot more memory than what it took a few years ago, so naturally we'll need to get more megabytes years down the road."

Eric Whyne, a junior computer science major, agrees.

"You have to do it," Whyne said. "The more bandwidth you have, the more you're going to use. The student body here is doing it. In the corps, we can't have TVs. So what do we do? We hop on the Internet. We're sucking up bandwidth like crazy."

Whyne, however, believes that supporting the students' ability to download is important if the school hopes to attract new students.

"They have to keep the bandwidth open, or people won't come here," Whyne said. "How many prospective students would come to Norwich after they found out you can't download here, because Internet access is very restricted. It's a real good argument for someone to say, 'I won't go to Norwich because their Internet isn't together there.' They'll go to another school."

According to Whyne, the current situation is workable, if students sacrifice sleep for work.

"I don't have any trouble, because I schedule my work correctly," Whyne said. "If I have a large file that I need to get off the Internet from somewhere, I do it in the middle of the night. Before five a.m., everyone is still asleep. No one has started to download yet. You can work around it."

Some students remain hopeful that the new upgrades will solve a lot of the current problems.

"Right now the Internet isn't close to satisfactory, even to the point where it's not even usable at times," according to Sylvia. "I don't think there's a point in having it if it's not going to work half the time. I hope the upgrade works."

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