The Online Reflector

Having just downed Sindragosa, the second-to-last boss in Ice Crown Citadel, my guild, in the process of a raid, was on the move to make some attempts on The Lich King. Finally, after months and months of grinding my druid character to 80 and getting gear, it was my turn. We approached the boss, laid out our plan through our headsets attached to a program called Vent, and charged in.

This is when my computer suddenly decided to become latent. I slowly worked through my rotation of abilities to do damage to the boss, hearing people scream at me in Vent for being out of position for the fight. I tried moving, but my keyboard was becoming unresponsive. And then it happened…I was booted from my game, back to the main menu with the “You have been disconnected from the server” message. I cursed. A lot. This was just another Saturday night for me, fighting the University of Indianapolis network.

Some of the people I raid with in World of Warcraft are prospective high school students from Wisconsin. They were considering attending UIndy until they saw how I struggled on the network and then crossed the school off their list. When asked by other prospective students about the network, my response is brutally honest. It sucks. While there are other facets about this school I love and wouldn’t trade for the world, the bottom line is the network is unpredictable.
There have been advances in the network.

Just 10 years ago, fiber optics were installed across campus, a significant upgrade from the 56k circuit ARCnet network the school had previously implemented back in 1992. The school continued to evolve in summer 2000 when it implemented three T1 systems.

In 2004, wireless Internet became available on campus. The school became labeled as an all-wireless campus after 2005. However, the campus apartments did not get full service wireless until 2009.
Upgrade continued in 2005. The Internet connection moved to an FDS3 system, creating 40 new megabytes of network to work with.

There was a three-year plan laid out for the IT department from 2006-2008 on their WEB site. According to the WEB site, no new milestones have been reached in those years. Now it could be my ignorance, or their WEB site may be outdated, but this makes me wonder why new milestones from 2006-2008 and even 2009 and 2010 have not been listed, and why a new plan has not been issued.

Now, I look at the increased number of freshmen each year and I feel my heart sink. Much like the seemingly always over-crowded residence halls, we now have an over-crowded network.

In previous articles done by The Reflector, Jeff Russell, chief information officer, said they were looking to upgrade to I-light in 2009, which was a statewide initiative to bring more bandwidth to the campus. We were supposed to get that in April. According to the I-light Web site, http://www.ilight.net/status_chart.php, UIndy isn’t even on that list as of October 2010.

Besides these seemingly minor glitches and annoyances, an antiquated network can lead to serious problems. In Sept. 2008, a cyber-attack to the network threatened nearly 11,000 personal records on the archived server, which contained detailed student and staff information.

It is time for changes to be made for the betterment of the university. I won’t pretend that I know everything about our bandwidth, or what needs to be done for our school’s network. I’m not the expert. I’m just the 22-year-old student looking to play WOW on a Saturday night, but finding himself increasingly unable to do so.