Resnet

29 October 2009

You said you were unhappy with the Resnet service

We took your complaints up with the University and they responded:

We are of course concerned if any of our students are experiencing problems with their residences internet connections but without knowing more details it would be difficult to comment on individual cases.

As far as I am aware there are no issues affecting the normal running of the Resnet service. If there were, I would be certainly be seeing a lot of complaints and would fully expect to be notified directly. A message would be posted on the status pages on the Resnet website - providing people can access it obviously. If there was a problem precluding people from the web site then phoning the Resnet Help Desk on 0333 123 0191 would provide updates on any outage.

Has Ann been in touch with Resnet regarding her problem? There are many things affecting the perceived speed of the internet ranging from time of day (congestion - local or on the sites visited), running many applications on your PC whilst accessing the internet (video and streaming audio all take their slice of bandwidth ). Question to ask yourself - Do you have apps running in the background which may not be obvious? Multiple websites which have streamed video content (updating in the background) or dare I say it running Peer to Peer software potentially can consume an enormous amount of bandwidth if you are not careful as well as potentially leaving you PC/Mac open to virus/worm attack. Is your PC/Mac up to date on operating system security updates and do you have virus/antispyware protection.

The most common problems concerning "slow connections" have be traced back to problems with the PC. That's not to say Resnet is infallible as there have certainly been equipment failures in the past.

One of our issues is the use demographic, as everybody is a student the use pattern of the network is more or less the same for all so there may be congestion at peak times. ISPs get round this problem due to the range of different people using their broadband connections at different times of the day or night. If we were to give every student, for example, a guaranteed, always uncontended 4Mbps - Heriot-Watt residential students would use almost the entire allocation of Janet bandwidth for Scotland :-). Many ISP providers use a contention ratio of 1:50 so for every "up to 10Mbps" service they sell it potentially could be shared with up to 49 other subscribers, fortunately for the ISP, digital transmission is so quick that in general, the chances of two people accessing something at the same time is very small therefore everybody has the impression they are getting their full allocation.

If the is a genuine problem here we need to get to the bottom of it, similarly if lots of people are experiencing problems we need to get to the bottom of it but the only way we can solve those issues is for people to report them.



What is HWUSA doing about it:

We will continue to review the service

We will continue to represent students at the Resnet management meetings

We will play an active part in surveying the users of Resnet to determine their experience.