Update: Network Upgrade

Technology and multimedia are everywhere and our network has seen a huge increase in use over the last 4 years. Think about how many times you now access the web to see a news clip or view other multimedia. In fact, in 2003, we were operating the entire campus on one T1 internet connection – close to what some people now have going to their homes or small businesses. In 2004, we expanded that to 3 T1’s and provided some rich multimedia content in the form of streaming videos of the International Poetry Forum archives. Today, in 2007, we are seeing all sorts of video and audio media and it is drastically increasing the load on our network. In fact, from noon to 8pm on an average weekday, it is very difficult to obtain a reliable internet connection. This impacted offices on campus that rely on third party websites, such as the Department of Education, and it impacted faculty and students who were trying to access the internet to obtain information for classes.

The Information Technology department carefully monitors these changes and has started implementing the next phase of our campus network that will take us into 2014 and beyond! In April, we doubled our internet connection again – taking us to 6 T1’s! This seems like a huge increase, and while we have a little extra bandwidth right now, we are seeing peaks daily around 2:00pm and we predict that this will quickly be consumed over the next two years.

We are also increasing the speed of our internal network by moving from a 100mb network to a gigabit network. We are starting by implementing new equipment at the core of our network and we will expand that out through the various buildings in a seven phase, seven year, project. During this upgrade process, we will be announcing some minor internet downtime in order to install the new equipment. We ask for your patience as we make great improvements!

This summer’s renovations to the Frances Warde Hall lobby will include a new LCD message board system. There will be two message boards installed this year – one in the lobby and the other in the lobby of AJP.

The message boards will provide announcements about activities on campus, food service menus, and classroom changes and can be used to inform the campus quickly in the event of an emergency. There will be several offices on campus that can post announcements using PC-based posting software that connects with a centralized server.

Offices can choose from the many background templates provided to make the events exciting to view. Once the announcements are submitted by an office for posting, the software will place the announcement in an approval queue, similar to the process we currently use for posting to the student-list email, and the job will be scheduled and pushed to the various message boards.

In the following budget years, the campus will add message boards to other key locations on campus including Antonian Hall, Grace Library, and Aquinas Hall.