Mihir “Chat” Chatterji, the newly appointed director of information technology services, has been spending much of his time learning about the university’s Internet system, and has pinpointed two main reasons for its slow service and unreliability.

Chatterji, who started work in October, has narrowed the difficulties with the network system to two reasons, the capacity of the Internet and patchwork repairs have taken the place of upgrades. His findings have further supported the need for consultants to look at the infrastructure of Eastern’s network and move toward a multi-million dollar upgrade project.

Jeff Cooley, vice president for business affairs, and Chatterji hope a $6 million upgrade will both increase the capacity of the Internet and put an end to “Band-Aid” repairs that do little to enhance the system’s performance.

Internet users on campus have been aggravated by frequent crashes and crawling service that has been aggravated by the Ethernet and an increase of students, Cooley said previously.

While six new servers added last year helped relieve some of the problem, Chatterji said the solution may lie much deeper in the system.

Many people, Chatterji said, have a misconception that the slow service of the Internet is due to overloaded servers. However, the problem really lies in one of two places, the Internet service or the campus network.

“None of the servers I know of at (Information Technology Services) are under a heavy enough load to cause students to wait for more than a few seconds in order to get e-mail or a campus web page,” he said in an e-mail.

All servers are at the ultimate mercy of the bottleneck between the campus desktop and the Internet regardless of the Internet provider, he said. Eastern has no direct control over anything that happens on the the other side of the Illinois Century Network connection, the connection used by most state universities.

“It is my opinion that the ICN provides a stable, solid connection,” he said. “But even ICN can’t guarantee what goes on after it delivers you to the backbone and … onto the last mile on the other side of the Internet galaxy.”

The real culprit, as far as slow Internet performance, has to be somewhere between the user’s PC/Mac and the Internet itself,” he said.

The Internet pipe transporting information is limited to about 20 megabytes per second. Of that space, over eight megabytes are set aside for residence halls’ use, he said.

“Many schools our size do all right with that size of pipe. However, it also depends on the use it’s getting,” he said. “A residential school places higher demands on the Internet connection, particularly if its students surf voraciously or download lots of music and video.”

Adding bandwidth to the Internet pipe would both be costly and may not guarantee faster service, since added bandwidth fills up quickly.

A second reason for the unreliability and slowness of the Internet, he said, was the lack of upgrades the system has undergone. In the mid 1980s, Eastern’s equipment was state-of-the-art, but it has not seen substantial attention since then.

Furthermore, the Ethernet was applied in offices and labs over the old wiring, meaning old equipment was set up to run new technology. In most buildings,

Eastern is fooling Ethernet equipment into thinking its working with Ethernet PCs and Macs.

“This is a quick and dirty way of supplying Ethernet to where it’s needed, (but) it sometimes causes ‘broadcast storms’ which bring down the local networks in buildings successively in a domino fashion, forcing ITS to shut down whole sections of campus while it does room-to-room searches to find a single offending plug,” Chatterji said. “Obviously we must upgrade our fragile network.”

The consultants will decide how much of the campus needs to be rewired and where improvements need to be made, Cooley said previously. The university was denied funding for the technology upgrades this year, but he hopes efforts next year will prove more fruitful.

However, with shortfalls in the state budget, Cooley admits chances for funding may be slim, and administrators may have to look at other funding options.