When Columbia’s Internet system went down on Sept. 12 because of a firewall crash, the effects were felt collegewide. Oasis, the school’s main line of communication, as well as Colum.edu, loop email and Moodle went down, preventing students from accessing data stored on the system, registering for classes and causing a temporary standstill in online interactions between faculty and students.

According to information on Columbia’s website, the school places an emphasis on technological advancement and network reliability. However, outdated and underfunded infrastructure, despite recent improvements to the system, result in a network that is not always capable of supporting the nearly 12,000 students and approximately 2,000 faculty members who use it on a daily basis.

An upgrade was made to the campus’ Internet infrastructure on Aug. 26, according to a collegewide email sent on the same day that stated, “The upgrade will allow the Columbia community to share data and resources over one the most advanced research networks currently available.”

But a contrary effect occurred when, as previously mentioned, the network abruptly shut down two weeks later, causing unforeseeable difficulties across campus.

“[The crash] had a great impact in our department because we had already started our classes,” said Pantelis Vassilakis, chair of the Audio Arts and Acoustics Department. “So communication between students and teachers via email became almost impossible.”

According to Vassilakis, the college has grown significantly during the last 30 years acquiring certain special needs along the way.

With more than 600 students now enrolled in his department, he said issues of network reliability are major. That issue is compounded collegewide when the entire college—the largest arts college in the nation—is taken into account.

“I think the college as a whole has grown faster than its IT department,” Vassilakis said.

In an effort to help the Internet catch up to the growth of the college, the IT department came up with a plan to update the infrastructure piece by piece. The December 2009 plan, “Information Technology Planning 2010–2012,” includes a finance report, an overview of challenges facing the college’s technological advancement as well as suggestions for improvement.

But it has a rather short life span.

The report, written nearly two years ago, states that, “without continued investment in infrastructure by Columbia College and other providers, Internet performance will be inadequate within three to five years.”

The plan also states that during the next three years, IT will stress certain areas in network improvement, including network infrastructure, risk management, unified communications and applications development.

While the college has continued to invest in infrastructure for the computer system—arguably the most vital aspect of the network¬—a list of non-funded projects remains, according to the report.

According to the report’s author, Bernadette McMahon, associate vice president and CIO for information technology, many aspects contained in the report have been put on hold as the school moves into phase two of “prioritization.” She recommends using all of the department’s resources in the best way possible so that “the academics have what they need.”

As for the IT Department, “We don’t have sufficient bandwidth for what some of the college’s needs are,” McMahon said. “We are going to be expanding the bandwidth for the institution.”

As previously reported in The Chronicle on Sept. 6, prioritization is the process in which all of the college’s departments, both academic and non-academic, will be analyzed in order to reallocate funds toward areas most in need of them.

“The goal here is to be as streamlined and as efficient with our resources as we possibly can so we don’t have to expand and we do give good service,” McMahon said.

According to Vassilakis, the IT department communicates with the chairperson of every department whenever a change is being made to the internet or infrastructure.

“The last response we got from IT indicated that within this academic year, all of the infrastructure will be put into place to solve [the Internet] problems,” Vassilakis said. “If this indeed happens, then we will be really happy.”

According to McMahon, the college is adding a dark fiber ring to the infrastructure to connect all the campus buildings. However, this won’t be done until sometime in January or February 2012. As a first step in improving the infrastructure and adding this new fiber ring, the IT Department hired Richard Piotrowski, the new director of infrastructure, so McMahon doesn’t have to work on the infrastructure alone, she said.

The Audio, Arts and Acoustic and the Interactive Arts and Media departments have their own technology systems because they are “technology intensive,” Vassilakis said. They mainly use the college network for its Internet connection, in order to help students and faculty stay in constant communication.

“Our server is awesome,” said Joseph Cancellaro, chair of the IAM Department. “I think the whole college should model after what we have.”

The AAA Department specifically wants the ability to share very high sized files between the classroom and the student’s home.

“This is very important to our class, otherwise student work is limited to the class time and this is not enough, as we all know,” Vassilakis said.

Because of the advanced systems of these technology-driven departments, they are located within the buildings that have the highest Internet speed access.

According to the IT report, the buildings that receive 1 GB of network speed—the highest of Columbia’s networks—include: the Alexandroff Campus Center, 600 S. Michigan Ave.; South Campus Building, 624 S. Michigan Ave.; 618. S. Michigan Ave. Building; and the Wabash Campus Building, 623 S. Wabash Ave. Other buildings such as the 33 E. Congress Parkway Building, the 1104 Center, 1104 S. Wabash Ave., and 1000 S. Wabash Ave. Building get 250 MBs of speed. The IT Department building, 218 S. Wabash Ave., receives 100 MBs. Lastly, the Residence Hall, 731 S. Plymouth Court, receives the least at 50 MBs.

“The reason we are [breaking up the Internet speeds is] so we can distribute it much better after February,” McMahon said. “We had to segment things because we are an urban campus … We pay Internet providers [separately] for each building.”

According to McMahon, the college originally had 250 MBs of network speed available to each building and students weren’t “maxing out” the limit. However, as the college has grown, students stream increasing amounts of information online, causing the college to increase speeds in certain buildings.

It’s yet to be seen whether the college’s prioritization plan will lead to significant enhancements in the computer network. Decisions on the process are scheduled to be announced in May after approval by the board of trustees.

As for the current network, students and faculty can enjoy the high-tech systems located in Media Production Center, 1632 S. State St., with its 10GB backbone, among others. But they’ve still got to deal with slow connections and potential crashes.

“Yeah, [the Internet] is adequate as long as it’s running,” Cancellaro said. “That’s the key. It’s not that there is a blame game going on here, its just that when the Columbia College network goes down it effects everyone across the board.”