By Greg Cox
Daily Staff Reporter
The University's "information superhighway" could have traffic jams as bad as the more conventional streets of Ann Arbor - that is, if the Information Technology Division didn't make efforts to update and improve the University network.
A recent ITD survey found that computer use at the University has increased dramatically in recent years as the campus has become more dependent upon technology for day-to-day life.
The study found that more than 60 percent of University students own a personal computer, and more than 90 percent of the student body corresponds via e-mail.
"The data provided by the survey is intended to help improve ITD services and to get an idea as to what our customers use the service for," said Andrew Fabbro, an ITD marketing research employee. "Eighty-five percent of students and 53 percent of faculty members surveyed indicated that they used computers for socializing as well as work."
The 100 miles of fiber optic cable that forms the network connecting more than 1,000 computers at University computing sites is traversed almost continually by users in 160 connected buildings. University mainframes and Web servers handle a barrage of nearly one million requests during the course of an average day.
"Most people we surveyed said that they believed their usage had peaked, but it's more likely that usage will continue to increase," Fabbro said.
ITD spokesperson Kathleen McClatchey said that since the survey was taken, ITD has constantly made changes to the system in order to satisfy student, faculty and staff requests.
"ITD is evaluating potential changes based on their projected benefit and cost effectiveness," McClatchey said.
McClatchey mentioned several possible courses of action that would have an array of results.
"One change we're looking at implementing is making more modem lines available as increasing numbers of people are logging into the network from home," McClatchey said. "Another is increasing the number of Win/Tel boxes because many students are coming in with Windows experience."
Efforts also are being made by the Computer Aided Engineering Network to improve the computing environment at the University - particularly the North Campus network.
CAEN is in the process of changing its workstations over from a "shared" ethernet connection to a "switched" ethernet connection, said CAEN administrator Randy Frank. In practical terms, this means an effective increase of 10 to 50 times the usable network bandwidth for the improved system.
Frank mentioned that the University is also part of a project to create a new Internet with better, faster data transfer.
"The University is part of an initiative called Internet II, designed to provide, initially for the academic community, a replacement for the current Internet," Frank said. "(The new system) will run at a speed 10 or more times the current speed."
Some students said the most beneficial changes ITD could make to the computing environment at the University involved services rather than servers.
"They need more people working to connect computers in dorm rooms to ethernet," said LSA first-year student Lisa Sharbaugh. "They took two months to install ethernet in my room."
Fabbro said that one of the biggest surprises of the ITD survey was that most users prefer to seek help from peers.
"The people we surveyed favored one-on-one sessions with friends and family over consulting a manual," Fabbro said.