Miami University's IT services combined the residence and academic Internet pipelines for a better Internet connection for students in late January.
There will be a larger amount of bandwidth for students to use at all hours of the day in both academic buildings and residence halls, Cathy McVey, senior director of strategic communications and planning, said.
Originally, there were only two Internet services: one for state and academic buildings and one for residence halls, McVey said.
The separate sources of bandwidth were treated individually, due to the fact that ResNet was funded by two different sources: students who pay on campus housing fees and by the Miami Education and General (ENG) budget, McVey said.
In the past few years, IT Services noticed a trend where students used the Internet more during the day in academic buildings and used the Internet more at night in residence halls, McVey said.
IT Services decided to fuse these different pipelines together to offer double the bandwidth to the entire campus, instead of the original amounts that are only offered to specific buildings, McVey said.
This allows better quality of Internet access to students throughout the day.
Sophomore Josh Sewell said he has been frustrated by a slow Internet connection at Miami in the past.
"Not having a consistent Internet connection during necessary times can be a bit of an obstacle because it takes so much longer for me to complete online assignments and research," Sewell said.
The only potential problems that could happen are if the trends of what times students use the Internet change drastically, but the department doubts this will occur. The only potential problems that could result would be that the Internet would be just as slow as before.
ResNet Turbo is still the premium bandwidth option and will not be affected by this change because it receives bandwidth from a different source. It will continue to receive at least 2 GB per second, no matter what is changed throughout the process.
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Senior Tony Baldrick said he noticed a change in Internet quality after the pipelines were fused.
"I noticed a change this semester but I didn't know what it was from," Baldrick said. "The Internet hasn't given me any problems in the classrooms so far since the joining of these."
Combining the two pipelines was the result of student feedback about Internet problems, McVey said.
"One of the things that we really ask students to do, is if you have a problem connecting or maintaining a connection, make sure you contact the support desk, because if we don't hear where there are problems, we can't fix things," McVey said. "It's been the feedback we've gotten from students that's led us to make the changes we have, and the more we hear, the better we can respond."
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