Network to go down Saturday
Utah State University’s data network will be completely down on Saturday morning in order to begin an information technology network upgrade process that promises better connectivity and network speed.
The outage will begin at 7 a.m. Saturday morning and last for about four hours, said Kevin Grover, network systems specialist. He said some services would not go back up in the four-hour time frame, but he and his crew would work to have WebMail, the QUAD, access to the Internet, and other much-used services up by that time.
“We did our best to find a time to do this that would adversely affect the least amount of people,” Grover said.
Barbara White, vice president for information technology and chief information officer, said, “As many are aware, we are in the process of upgrading the campus information technology fiber infrastructure.
In addition, we are preparing to install the latest, most advanced copper cable infrastructure available inside the buildings of the campus.”
This upgrade, said Scott Bradley, director of Telecommunications and Telephone Services, will eventually raise the bandwidth of the campus data backbone from 100 megabits per second to 1 Gigabit per second.
“That equates to 100 million bits per second to 1 billion bits per second,” he said. “It will be 10 times faster than what it is now.”
In addition, over the next few months, this will enable the bandwidth that is currently delivered to the end users’ desktop at USU to be ultimately 10 times greater, he said.
“The university really is on a path that will keep us on the leading edge of connectivity,” he said.
One of the first steps in this process, Grover said, is to prepare the core router for the new fiber infrastructure. He said this involved disconnecting the connections from an old cabinet and reconnecting them to a new cabinet.
“That’s why the entire network will be down,” he said.
Bradley said that for the next five weeks, all of the fiber to the individual academic buildings would be upgraded as well.
“This means that as we go through this process, some buildings will experience temporary outages,” he said.
He added that, for the most part, the outages will occur overnight and would not affect end users, but sometimes they might.
Grover said anyone interested in knowing the future network outage schedule can visit http://dd.usu.edu/netstatus to find out when their building will be upgraded.