Internet speed to increase
By Sol Tran
After weeks of students and faculty being frustrated by slow internet, the university is switching internet service providers.
Freshman Linda Young has been one of the many affected students.
"We pay almost fifty grand a year and we don't even get fast internet here. Come on, it is fifty grand a year, we should have the fastest internet in the world."
The slow speed on streaming video and other entertainment uses on the internet is due to limited bandwidth, said Carl Fussell, director of Information Technology.
Bandwidth is the capacity of the network to transfer data, such as streaming video.
Due to the high cost, the school only has a bandwidth of 100 megabits per second.
In order to ensure that academic programs can function quickly, the IT department has set up slower speeds for entertainment activity, and that has affected streaming video on sites such as YouTube.com, said Ron Danielson, vice provost for information services.
The university should expect an increase to 500 megabits per second in several months, Fussell said.
He also said he is disappointed with the slow speed."One hundred megabits is really inadequate for the demand. We really could use more than that," he said.
The school is switching from AT&T and moving back to Verizon.
Fussell said, "I would expect a substantial jump in speed within six to seven weeks." He also said there should be a 50 percent increase in speed within the next four weeks.
Sophomore Bret Gladfelty said the slower internet speed has negatively affected his classroom experience.
"Even in class, we had to wait 10-20 minutes for YouTube videos to load," he said. "It was just a five minute video, and normally it should have taken a minute to load. It was a big waste of class time."
The slow buffering has frustrated ethnic studies professor James Lai multiple times.
"I would have everything ready, but then the video doesn't load," he said. "It makes me look bad, disorganized. "
Lai said that Web sites like YouTube are normally helpful in a classroom setting.
"There is a lot of stuff on YouTube that has really good content that can really help us understand important things in class. It is so much easier for me to teach having a clip from YouTube rather than finding the DVD, cueing it up to the chapter. I need things to be streamlined when I'm giving a lecture."
A Facebook group called "SCU Students for Faster Internet," which has 275 members, was started by a group of dissatisfied students.
"I think it is adversely affecting our education because they decided to throttle back the streaming media," Gladfelty said.
Lai said he is not the only faculty member to complain about the slow streaming media.
"It is frustrating," he said. "Why do we spend so much on A/V equipment, when we can't even use it the way its supposed to be used?"
Contact Sol Tran at vtrankiem@scu.edu.