What a nice surprise tonight to see a major article at Computerworld that focuses on network upgrades and access at Armstrong Atlantic State University (where I teach English and journalism courses): Forecast 2014: Boost your mobile bandwidth.
From the piece:
When Robert Howard first took over as CIO at Armstrong Atlantic State University in Savannah, Ga., last year, there was little doubt of his mandate.
“Wireless connectivity and general bandwidth issues were a point of concern among students,” Howard says. And that concern was warranted — the university’s bring-your-own-device policy had sparked a 250% increase in the number of devices attaching to the network in the previous 12 months.
Wireless access points, core switches, network pipes and Internet connections all had become choke points, according to Howard. The network simply had to be unclogged because the university used mobile access to attract students, faculty and staff, and because it had plans to shift key applications — including its email, ERP and learning management systems — to the cloud to save money and foster business continuity.
The Armstrong team couldn’t continue with stopgap measures such as adding new access points whenever the switches and pipes behind them were at capacity. “We had to stop trying to do the math to make the old network work and start at architectural ground zero on a new one. Unless we removed the bottlenecks, [the university’s mission] was going to suffer,” Howard says.
And that’s just the first four paragraphs of an article that spans five webpages — the first two pages return again and again to the upgrades at Armstrong.
It seems like many Savannahians still think of Armstrong as that quiet commuter school way out there on the Southside, but it’s a buzzing hub of activity — social, cultural, artistic, scientific — with over 1,500 students living on campus.
According to Alexa, Computerworld is among the 5,000 most popular sites on the world wide web, and among the 2,000 most popular sites in the U.S.
Here at Savannah Unplugged, we’re satisfied just to be the 3,241,117th most popular site on the web.