K-State's Internet connection to improve in January

K-State gets its commodity Internet service (aka "Internet1") through the Kansas Research and Education Network (KanREN Inc., www.kanren.net), a consortium of Kansas universities; two- and four-year colleges; K-12 school districts; and libraries.

KanREN in turn buys Internet1 service from Qwest and SBC Internet Services (SBCIS), connecting to Qwest in Kansas City through the Great Plains Network consortium (www.greatplains.net, where we also get our Internet2 connectivity) and to SBCIS in Wichita on the Wichita State University campus.

K-State, along with other KanREN members in the northern half of the state, gets its Intenet1 service from Qwest, while members in the southern half get their Internet1 service from SBCIS. Until recently, that meant that if KanREN's connection to Qwest failed, K-State lost connection to the Internet -- we were dead in the water. And as everyone knows, when we can't get to the Internet, K-State comes to a screeching halt.

Improving reliability in our Internet connection became a high priority for K-State and the KanREN consortium. One seemingly obvious solution is to re-route Internet traffic through SBCIS if the Qwest connection fails, and vice versa.

In fact, that's the way routing now works as of a few weeks ago -- if Qwest fails, K-State's Internet traffic is automatically re-routed through the SBCIS connection in Wichita.

Unfortunately, the SBCIS connection is only 75 Mbps compared to the 250 Mbps of Internet1 service KanREN members buy from Qwest. When Qwest fails, we're trying to cram up to 325 Mbps of Internet traffic through a 75 Mbps pipe. It works, but performance is abysmal.

In mid-November, KanREN university members agreed to increase the SBCIS Internet1 connection to 250 Mbps to match the Qwest connection so that both connections provide backup. It's still an oversubscription situation in the event of a failure (325 Mbps of service through a 250 Mbps pipe), but in practice it will work very well. K-Staters will likely not even notice a performance degradation during a failure.

Plus the switchover is automatic. When the routers in the network detect a failure in Qwest, they will automatically re-route K-State's Internet1 traffic to SBCIS through Wichita.

KanREN expects to have this additional bandwidth in place in January, before the start of the spring semester or soon thereafter.

Besides the improved reliability, the other good news is the cost. Due to the continuing trend of lower rates for Internet service, K-State is able to buy this additional redundant bandwidth at no additional cost. In fact, our total bill for Internet service will be slightly lower than what it was in July 2004.

This reflects the value of the KanREN consortium where the members leverage their joint needs to get better aggregate pricing on a shared solution. The beneficiaries are every K-State faculty, staff, and student who will have fewer disruptions as they do their work.

—H. Townsend, Computing and Network Services