Recently for student residents, accessing e-mail has been like driving straight into a traffic jam. And their horns are blaring.

“There have been a select few times when Information Technology Services says the internet’s going to be down, but it’s down a whole lot more. It’s really obnoxious. You’d think that at a big university like this, they’d be able to have that under control,” says sophomore Michael Czuba, resident of the Griesedieck complex.

Indeed, many campus residents have been banging their fists in frustration while unsuccessfully trying to access the internet. Quite a few of these residents have channeled that frustration into a phone call to Information Technology Services (ITS). Often, ITS only becomes aware of system backups when these phone calls arrive, due to the reactive mode under which the support center works. In other words, they can only fix the problem when it actually occurs.

This system has become problematic for some residents.

Clemens Hall resident Vickie Weber recalls a time when the internet failed when she needed it. “Once, I had to take a friend to the train station, and I didn’t know how to get there. I was trying to get online directions, but the internet wasn’t working. We needed to go. She almost missed her train,” Weber says.

ITS has made two primary responses to these complaints. One, that the Napster program has clogged the internet lines. Two, that there was a “bottleneck on one of the server’s disks” (according to a recent e-mail from ITS Director of Client and System Services Austin Winkleman).

A recent upgrade to the “backbone,” or main line, of the SLU internet system have greatly improved the efficiency of SLU’s connection to the worldwide web. To explain the effect of this on the network’s structure, ITS Assistant Vice President of IT Applications Services Thomas Nowicki says, “Think of our [system] backbone as the interstate highway system. Before, we maybe have had a two-lane highway. Now, we’ve built a 15 or 20-lane highway. But those entrances to and exits from the highway (the connections to the buildings from the backbone) have not been upgraded yet and are very small at this point. When you hear people talking about slowdown in the network, what you’re probably seeing in many cases are people that are having trouble accessing into the backbone.”

ITS has planned to “widen” those “onramps and offramps,” eventually updating all buildings within the next couple of years. Some of the residence halls have been targeted for major upgrades as well, beginning this fall.

“The top six floors of Griesedieck will be upgraded. All of Reinert Hall will be upgraded with new cabling, so they’ll have a fast hookup,” says Nowicki. “We’ll eventually go through the other residence halls so we have what we call a `port per pillow,’ or a data connection in the wall for each person in the room.”

As for the Support Center, ITS plans to switch to a proactive mode, which would involve problem anticipation and prevention. Hopefully, then, all conflicts will be resolved before they affect system performance.

None of these upgrades should cause a raise in costs for students, as they are being funded by SLU2000 and the Danforth Foundation.

Lewis Reed, Director of Network Communications at ITS, states, “If you take a look at where we currently are, where we came from, and where we’re going, and then take a look at other universities, it puts this university in a total different class.”

Hopefully in the near future, then, accessing e-mail will be less like a traffic jam and more like a Sunday drive.