UNT's Internet Connection

My staff has faxed a copy of a contract to the Texas Department of Information Resources (DIR) to switch our Internet connection from the Texas Higher Education Network (THEnet) to a DIR router in Dallas. We believe this change will result in a significant improvement to both the performance and the general reliability of our Internet access. It also has far greater growth potential than our existing configuration. The new service will be deployed as quickly as equipment and circuit procurement can be accomplished.

Our present Internet connection is a single T1 circuit from the UNT campus to UT-Dallas, from which it is relayed over redundant T1 circuits to the THEnet hub in Austin. From there THEnet connects to SprintNet. This design has two basic problems. First, there are multiple single points of failure which can result in a complete or significant outage of our Internet access beyond the T1 circuit between here and UTD. Second, our traffic is aggregated with other subscribers on the links between UTD and Austin, potentially resulting in degradation of performance due to contention for a limited resource.

For the past few months many Internet providers, including major ones such as SprintNet which provides the Internet connectivity for THEnet, have been experiencing overloads. In addition, the THEnet/SprintNet connection has been unstable on a number of occasions. The solution we are implementing with DIR will provide us with dual T1 connections into a 100 Mb/sec FDDI ring in Dallas which in turn is connected to multiple major Internet access providers. This should boost our available bandwidth significantly and provide us with a much greater level of fault tolerance.

Check unt.networking for further announcements on this topic. - Ed.

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