(Editor’s note: This is the first of a three-part series about Eastern’s computer network infrastructure. Coming Thursday: How the campus network functions.)

The adage goes, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” And for many years, Eastern has taken that same approach to its network woes.

But with the proposal of a new $100 technology fee that will help pay for a $6 million network upgrade, the Eastern community may see the problems as merely a fracture.

Eastern’s commitment to network already showing

Most recently, with various software improvements, Eastern installed software for a much larger-scale upgrade than it has normally experienced.

A new piece of software was installed over spring break in hopes to lessen the bandwidth demand of file-sharing programs like KaZaa.

The software, which is called a package shaper, cost $20,000 and was paid from money from Information Technology Services. The new package shaper replaced another, less effective one installed over Christmas break.

Mihir Chaterjee, vice president of Information Technology Services, said Eastern got a good deal.

“We’re lucky because we got refunds from certain companies who charged lower maintenance,” he said. “Otherwise, we wouldn’t have been able to afford it.”

The old packet shaper gave top priority to large bandwidth-demanding file-sharing programs that were able to cloak their file identities like it was a web browsing packet.

The new package shaper, purchased from Packateer, is able to look at individual files or packets in more detail than the previous one.

“Any kind of Internet data transfer is broken into little packets,” Chaterjee said. “The old packet shaper was unable to look at each individual packet, but instead looked at only the type of traffic — the old one wasn’t able to differentiate so file sharing took up bandwidth ports normally saved for web browsing.”

The problems of an old infrastructure

The two package shapers were installed as part of the Network Infrastructure Upgrade, but were needed because of a slow network.

Chaterjee said the main problem was multi-mode fiber-optic wiring that has been in place since the late eighties.

A once state-of-the-art network has received only band-aid improvements over the last 15 years.

Tim Lewis, a network engineer for ITS, said the wiring was done in 1988.

“The same things we’re doing now, we were doing back then,” Lewis said. “There was basic forms of e-mail, file transfers for information, data sets and data bases — just the file sizes were a lot smaller and we didn’t need as much speed.”

But the low request for speed at the time may have been a good thing as the connection speed was not Ethernet, but rather a modem dial-up.

“The service was not good — students were dependent on the computer labs,” said Bill Schnackel, director of housing and dining from July 1995 to February 2001. “The old system was efficient, but it had limitations.”

The original network configuration had computers connect to the network with token rings, which are still found in most academic buildings. The token ring looks like an outlet and has the capability of running at 4 megabits per second — slow by today’s standards.

As the need for Ethernet grew, the university installed an adaptor piece called a balun, which looks like an electrical outlet, into the token rings, Chaterjee said.

“The Ethernet has been applied in needed offices/labs over the old existing Token-Ring wiring,” Chaterjee said in a November e-mail. “Thus a technology which was designed for 4 megabits per second is now being used to run at 10 megabits per second (with the capability of) 100 megabits per second.

“We have in effect, tricked the Token-Rings into thinking the cable is Ethernet.”

From the token rings, the fiber-optic wiring, which is centralized in the Student Services Building, is directed underground through steam tunnels to academic and residence hall buildings.

Chaterjee said the Ethernet speed would only be 10 megabits per second if no one else was on the Internet, but said the current speed was 6 megabits.

Schnackel, currently the senior director for administrative services at Purdue University, said residence halls were rewired with single-mode fiber-optic wiring, a more direct and faster line data can transmit from, instead of the balun upgrade.

Ford, McKinney and Weller residence halls and various buildings in Greek Court received the new single-mode wiring first in spring of 2000, with the rest of the residence halls following in January of 2001.

The project cost $4 million.

Although students appreciated the upgrade, they encountered problems almost immediately.

“When it works, it’s good,” Sara Pavlike, a then-sophomore social science major, said in an article in the Nov. 26, 2001 edition of The Daily Eastern News.

Other problems included the costly expense of network adapting cards and cables, computer configuration and understaffing for network engineers, Schnackel said.

“At Eastern, there was a frustration with just technology in general (at the time),” he said. “The impression was that technology had been underfunded and the emphasis should be on academic funding and faculty.”

The next improvement after the residence halls and Booth Library rewiring was the addition of seven routers in spring of 2002. Lewis said routers take protocol information and determine the correct destination for it.

The alteration resulted in a temporary increase in speed, but the network still had problems. Last fall, the Internet was out of service for a week because of the added use brought by a large freshman class.

Chaterjee was hired soon thereafter to help fix the network problems. The reasons for the server problems narrowed to two reasons — the capacity of the Internet and the patchwork repairs that have taken the place of upgrades.

Jeff Cooley, vice president for business affairs, asked for $6 million from the Illinois Board of Higher Education to use toward upgrading the network, but his allocation request was denied because of the state’s current economic status.

The university, however, has been able to make subtle upgrades since the IBHE denial.

Aside from the two package shapers, Eastern also added 10 megabits of of bandwidth before spring break to make the current number 30. The Housing Network has 20 megabits of the bandwidth, with the other 10 for academic and administrative buildings.

Chaterjee expressed concern about increasing bandwidth in the e-mail.

“Adding bandwidth, while a very simple technical matter, costs large sums of money which someone, somewhere has to pay for,” he said. “The cost of adding bandwidth is $300 per megabit per month. Therefore, adding another 20 megabits would probably run $6,000 a month.”

The someone Chaterjee mentioned for this semester is the Housing and Dining. Next semester, the extra cost will work into their yearly budget, Chaterjee said.