Technology News

This is a question that just came in from a student who was interested in knowing if video chat would work on campus using some of the popular tools such as Google video chat.  The short answer is well, sorta, but it might be sporadic.

For those who care about the details, the college currently has a 45Mb/sec connection to the Internet. This connection is shared by all campus users. The basic principal we follow in managing the connection is to share equally and create the best experience possible for the majority of uses.

Even though we have a relatively small connection, it is possible to share it amongst a large number of users because most uses consist of short bursts of activity such as browsing the web. There are uses such as streaming video and file sharing, that tend to be continuous rather than short bursts of activity. If even 30 people, were doing these kinds of continuous activities, it would severely degrade the experience of the large numbers of people doing the lighter activities such as web browsing. This is the instance where we do not just share equally. Preference is given to the traffic that is bursty such as web browsing. There is also a higher priority given to traffic originating from academic spaces and faculty and staff offices. This is done to ensure that class lab activities, etc go as smoothly as possible.

For an institution our size, we have a limited connection. During the coming year we will be upgrading the connection adding another 50% or more bandwidth. It is our goal to be able to at least double the connection by the end of the 10/11 academic year.

Thanks for the initial question (it’s a good one!) and we’ll keep you posted..

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 20th, 2009 at 2:57 pm and is filed under Academic, General Evergreen, Tech Help. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.