By Amelia Wessner
Northeastern has recently updated its Internet services by going through a number of adjustments this past year, including new electronics, new self-service sites, and more availability for downloading music.
Last year’s 50 percent increase in demand catalyzed Northeastern into action towards improving quality and reliability for NU students.
Information Services was responsible for the changes.
Behind the improvements of the Internet, Bob Weir, vice president of Information Services said, “[We] made massive investments in the Internet last year. We were surprised with the 50 percent higher demand for the Internet, [which were] mainly [due to] downloads. We found that many other schools had the same problem.”
Weir said, “Last year we had the capacity, but we didn’t see the demand coming.”
During the last school year, NU invested in Internet improvements that concluded in January.
“We continued to send out letters to NU, updating students on the Internet improvements. We ended the year great,” said Wier. “Over the summer, NU made more improvements to make sure that there were no more surprises for NU’s Internet demands.”
Weir listed the three main problems that were taken into account. “One, was to fix the [last year’s] problem, by continuing to stay ahead, (of the Internet demand); second, was to fix the redundancy, (the repetitive outages that students experienced); third, was the ResNet investment upgrade, done by updating all connection gear.”
The first step NU took was upgrading half of ResNet’s services. With finished upgrades that were made over the summer, last year’s dorm network problems are now greatly improved.
Although there were improvements made in ResNet, they were not liked by Linda McGovern, a second year graduate student in speech pathology.
McGovern said, “I linked [the Internet] up to changes recently. It was great last year. The last few weeks have been annoying. I haven’t been able to get on.”
Dan Shirier, a sophomore sociology major, mentioned he couldn’t get on the system his first day back from summer vacation, and lately, Shirier couldn’t get onto Blackboard, an “online classroom” used by many professors.
