By
Shana Heiser
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Devices may not be in place until end of semester
Two new Internet routers will be in place by the end of the semester to avoid future connection failures like the 12-hour outage last week.
The new equipment has been ordered, but it will take five to six weeks for the products to arrive and be installed, said Ted Frohling network systems analyst principal.
Instead of one router, the only connection at the University of Arizona, two routers will share the Internet traffic load. If one router fails, the other router will be capable of picking up the slack.
"The odds of both of the routers failing at the same time are low," Frohling said.
As a short-term, interim solution, several newer devices have been put in place to handle the user load on the Internet, said Dan Roman, interim associate director for Center for Commuting Information Technology-telecommunications.
"We put a couple of devices in to bring us back to a stable environment," he said. "We took a couple of existing devices, spares, and are utilizing those."
Cisco, the network service provider recommended a more "robust environment," said Roman. The extra router would give the university more resilience because the campus will no longer rely on a single source.
Roxana Osuna, a psychology freshman said she is relieved the router will help make the Internet faster and more reliable for everyone.
"I had to do research for a paper, and I couldn't do it (during the last failure)," said Osuna. "I had to rent a computer."
To increase the capacity of users, Roman said CCIT is in the process of doubling the bandwidth from one 45 megabyte-line to two.
"We can have twice as many users using the off-campus link as we do now," he said.
The new routers will total an overall cost of about $170,000, Frohling said. The cost of the new routers is worth the money, Osuna said.
"If to have one router is so important, to have a back up is as important," she said.
Cisco will accept the old router for a "pretty good trade," so the cost is somewhat defrayed by their company, Frohling said.
Although the routers are almost foolproof, Roman said nothing can ensure a 100 percent success rate.
"We could get that lightning bolt and that would change everything," he said.
