Campus Computing News

By Dr. Maurice Leatherbury, Senior Director of Academic Computing

Dial-up with 56K Modems Now

The Networking and Communications Services department of the Computing Center has upgraded the software on many of our dialup ports to support the recently-ratified V.90 standard for modems. That standard, although designed for modems that are sold as "56K" modems, specifies that a maximum of 53 thousand bits per second is possible on standard phone lines. You may not (probably will not!) be able to get a full 53Kbps connection, but you're likely to see a higher speed than you're used to seeing if you have a V.90-capable modem. If you have a modem that supports the older "KFlex" protocol, you'll still be able to connect at the higher speeds afforded by that protocol. Of course, if you're really addicted to speed, we do offer ISDN connections at true 64Kbps for single lines and 128Kbps for dual lines.

As of the end of September, 1998, the following is our configurations of dialup lines and the protocols they support:

*ISDN and 56k services are not available to Fort Worth residents.

**We restrict Premium lines to seven subscriptions per line to prevent busy signals, so the Denton Premium service can support 1,484 subscribers at this time.

Additional Denton Dial-up Lines Available

Speaking of Premium lines, the Premium Access Dial-up Subscriptions for the Denton area only have been sold out for a couple of weeks. We have added additional lines and can now sell another 160 subscriptions. You can purchase a subscription at the University Store for either the fall semester ($45) or for the entire fiscal year ($120).

Year 2000 Compliance Checking Software Being Investigated

The Computing Center is investigating software packages that purport to check other software packages for Year 2000 compliance. The goal of the investigation is to select and purchase a product or several products that will assist the campus in identifying potential problems with desktop application software packages that are now in use. The products that we're looking at perform such tasks as checking whether a particular package has been certified by its manufacturer as being Y2K compliant, checking whether data formats in various types of files are potential problems, and even checking whether date values in some data fields could cause erroneous calculations. For example, one package claims to check whether two-digit or four-digit dates are entered into Excel spreadsheets. Sandy Burke (extension 3856) is spearheading the investigation of the various checking products and the results of the evaluation will be published in various for a when we feel confident that the best product(s) have been selected. Computer users on campus will be notified by their network managers when the checking packages are ready for use.n