Students and faculty have been experiencing problems getting on the internet in the past week, but help may be on the way.

Last spring, the campus was experiencing serious difficulty with the server. The internet had a slow response time and crashed often.

The university thought they fixed the problem with the addition of seven new routers, which direct transmission on the network, said Jeff Cooley, vice president of business affairs.

However, the increase of students this year, problems within the network infrastructure and the lack of staff to oversee the server have caused slow response times and unreliability to resurface this year.

“(The network) has had just some major problems. We had to shut down some things,” said John Henderson, director of computer services. “We’ve totally upgraded.”

Cooley said the university was working on fixing some of the infrastructure problems over the summer, but the server was not prepared to handle the increased traffic once students and faculty returned in the fall.

“Once students and faculty came back it cranked up demand and more problems popped up,” he said.

The unreliability of the server has also been irritated by the lack of leadership and oversight in the Information Technology Services area.

Bill Witsman, the former associate vice president of ITS, spent the most time dealing directly with technological difficulties specifically related to the internet, routers and the server. However, he is no longer with the university, and Cooley said his absence is felt at ITS.

The university searched for a replacement over the summer, but were unsuccessful and the search is continuing.

Over the weekend, Cooley said the university called in consultants from IBM to help fix the network. IBM helped to identify a piece of equipment that was causing 75 percent of the problems, but there are many pockets on campus with unreliable or down service.

“Spots are still having trouble and we are trying to troubleshoot those,” he said.

The server problems have proved more than just an inconvenience to faculty and students.

Some summer online classes had to rearrange schedules and make other arrangements to complete the class once the network was down.

James Tidwell, a journalism professor, taught three summer semester online classes and noticed a network problem the last day of classes in early August.

“It was like the first week of June and I noticed I couldn’t access Web CT,” Tidwell said.

“I just had to make some adjustments and have people send e-mails,” he said. “The last day of the semester, that’s when everything started falling apart. Had ( the network failure) happened earlier it would have been chaos.”

Network failure this semester could cause similar problems with fall semester courses since Web CT postings cannot be used without the network.

Cooley said that he has a master plan that may help permanently alleviate network trouble. He plans to send a proposal out to vendors by next week to bring in consultants and IBM specialists to give insight on how to better the design and engineering of the network.

Then he wants to conduct a massive multi-million dollar upgrade of the system.

Cooley currently has no definite answer as to when the network will be up and running in a dependable manner. He also could not comment on what the malfunctioning equipment was, or why it was malfunctioning.

“I’m always hopeful, but I won’t make any guarantees,” Cooley said. “I will guarantee my folks will do the best they can to make sure it is running.”