ITS moves to increase campus internet speed and efficiency

Youngstown State University Information Technology Services has taken several steps to increase the speed and efficiency of the internet on campus and has plans for additional improvements in the months ahead, including a significant increase in the university’s internet bandwidth.

“IT is an ever-changing landscape and it’s important that we continue to upgrade our systems to provide the increased demands of our students, faculty, employees and visitors to campus,” said Jim Yukech, associate vice president/chief information officer for ITS.

ITS has already implemented a “packet shaping smoothing” process to control internet congestion and increase traffic performance during high peak times and an Apple cache server that helps speed up software downloads and save bandwidth.

In addition, ITS is assessing increasing the priority for BlackBoard and Office 365 during peak periods, creating open air Wi-Fi areas on campus (i.e. the campus core and the fountain area) and implementing a caching server for non-Apple traffic, which could noticeably increase video streaming capabilities.

Yukech said the university is upgrading the current internet service from 1 gigabit per second to up to 10 Gpbs in time for the Fall 2018 semester, noting that demand is expected to be approximately 3 to 4 Gbps. He also noted that all public universities in the state YSU’s size or larger currently have 10 Gbps connections. The one-time cost in hardware is expected to be approximately $125,000.  The increase in annual costs will be determined by the bandwidth demand once implemented.

“As the demand from students and employees continues to increase for high-volume video streaming and other connections, we need to upgrade our capabilities,” Yukech said. “