Sprint Works to Improve UC Internet Service

UC Davis expanded its network capacity to the Internet this summer when the Office of the President negotiated an agreement with an independent company to provide a high-speed connection to the Internet for the four northern California UC campuses.

On Nov. 1, 1996, the Office of the President switched to Sprint, the lowest cost provider, for the high-speed Internet connection that serves the Berkeley, Santa Cruz, San Francisco, and Davis campuses. Since then, campuses have reported problems with lost information packets.

According to Stuart Lynn, Vice President for Information Resources and Communications for the Office of the President, UC is working closely with Sprint to improve the performance of the network.

In a Nov. 16 memo to the UC Network Operations Advisory Group, Lynn reported that Sprint had installed a new router and that other fine-tuning of the network would be forthcoming.

For the most part, the problems surface when information is sent from a UC campus to other high-traffic universities (e.g., Stanford) or vice versa. According to Russ Hobby, Director of Information Technology's Advanced Networked and Scientific Applications, as campuses move their Internet connections to different carriers, compatibility problems arise. The flow of information improves once the carriers identify the problem and fine tune their networks accordingly. Traffic flow between UC campuses is much smoother because the campuses utilize a single network, UCNet, run by the UC Office of the President. Hobby said the network difficulties can cause slowdowns on local campus e-mail servers as the servers become overloaded with messages waiting in queue. He said delays in campus e-mail traffic reported this month may have been caused by problems with the Sprint Internet service.

"I know how destabilizing the loss of a network can be to your colleagues and customers. . . This situation underscores how dependent we all are on these networks," Lynn wrote in his memo. "There is much work to be done to build up the robustness of the Internet --- Internet II is a step in the right direction, although it will not ease any of the problems in the short term."