Internet Upgrade

Overview

The College of Charleston has completed a major project that began in July 2012 to increase internet bandwidth and to upgrade the way in which the College connects to the Internet. The bandwidth for commodity Internet was increased from 290Mbps to 1.1Gpbs (almost quadrupled). Internet2 research bandwidth was increased from 100Mbps to 1Gpbs (900% increase). This bandwidth consolidates connectivity from three different ISP vendors which provides the campus with redundancy and reliability.

In order to perform the Internet connectivity upgrade, multiple major pieces of network equipment were replaced simultaneously. Management, performance monitoring, and troubleshooting software likewise had to be switched out with newer functionality capable of handling the huge increase in network bandwidth and traffic. For disaster/recovery planning, the Internet connections were split between two campus locations.

User Benefits

The benefits to faculty, staff, and students include:

• Increased capacity to support more simultaneous connections to the Internet
• Ability to support high bandwidth demands
• Faster processing of internet traffic
• More Bandwidth available for research and collaboration capabilities
•  Additional security protection
• Improved redundancy and reliability (if one ISP goes down, internet will remain up but just slower
• Capability to handle peak periods of usage
• Classroom capacity for video and other high bandwidth demands
• Cloud computing ready infrastructure