Campus Makes a Move to Improve Internet Speed

User feedback inspired switch to a new providerMaura TurcotteTHE SANTA CLARANovember 6, 2014 [dropcap]L[/dropcap]ast week, Santa Clara switched its campus Internet provider from Verizon to AT&T and increased Internet capacity by tenfold.“The new connection will be two separate circuits: one at 10 (gigabit per second) and one at 1 (gigabit per second),” said Carl Fussel, director of Information Technology. “Both will be in operation for an elevenfold increase, but with separate circuits, if one should develop a problem, the university will still have the other circuit in operation,” Before the switch, Santa Clara’s connection rate was just 1 Gbps. “The 1 Gb Internet pipe was being fully consumed and demands from the users were surpassing the capacity of the Verizon connection,” Fussel said in an email. “We also were receiving feedback from the user community that the connection wasn't meeting their needs or expectations.” This upgrade increases the connection elevenfold. IT does not expect any problems from the upgrade, according to Fussel, although some fine-tuning may have to be performed. Students said they are looking forward to the change, because they had apparently experienced problems connecting under the previous provider.“The old Wi-Fi was shifty. You couldn’t rely on it all the time,” said sophomore Hanna Ravi. “There seemed to be a lot of bugs that needed to be fixed.” Sophomore Michele Thorpe said the Wi-Fi never once worked on her phone. And even within his first several weeks at Santa Clara, freshman Mitchell Spinelli said that he often had to bounce between using “BroncoWiFi” and the “SCUGuest” network in order to connect to the Internet.Although all three students claimed they had not noticed a significant change in the campus Internet since Saturday, they said they are pleased Santa Clara is attempting to remedy the problem. Contact Maura Turcotte at  mturcotte@scu.edu .