Dialogue Signposts

Due to increasing demands from academic departments and the rising use of video streaming for both academic and personal use, our current bandwidth capacity is no longer providing us with a suitable volume, so download, connection times and streaming are slow or time out. As the work required to do this means we have to sever our connection to the internet for a period of time, we have made every effort to do the required work out of term time, to keep any disruption to our connection to the internet and its services to a minimum, however our most recent attempt, last week, was not successful.

Understanding that our internet capacity is a source of significant frustration for a number of our users (staff and student), we carried out a brief consultation with academic and support departments and members of our IT Student forum (including UG and PG members), requesting their thoughts on carrying out the upgrade sooner rather than later (particularly bearing in mind the forthcoming exam period). The consensus was that the potential benefits of increased bandwidth capacity were worth the disruption to the internet (and associated services) in the lead up to the exams.

The plan is as follows:

• At 07:30 on Wednesday 9th May we will carry out the work to upgrade our JANET connection to the internet, this will sever our connection to the internet and will take around 30 minutes.
• We then need to allow time for traffic to build so we can check that it has been successful: due to the nature of the work, despite testing we do as part of preparation we can only tell if it has been successful once the connection is re-established and normal traffic levels travel across the link.
• If early indications are that it is not working we will revert back to the existing connection straight away, otherwise we will monitor activity and if there is significant disruption we will revert back to the current link (and bandwidth capacity) at 10:00 so any disruptions to service will be resolved by 10:30.

If the upgrade is not successful on this occasion, we will revert to the original connection and attempt the work again, once the exams are finished. If that is the case users will still experience the issues with downloads, connections and streaming. We will do what we can to prioritise traffic (our focus will inevitably on academic and study use as far as possible) we would ask users to bear this in mind and be considerate reducing any social use of our internet connection (gaming, video streaming etc.).