Premium Remote Access Line ChangesThis article was the "Campus Computing News" article in last month's Benchmarks Online. Since that time, the changes described below have been put into place (on March 10). If you have problems accessing the PRAS lines, it may simply be a result of the reduced number of lines rather than an actual problem with the service. In most cases, you shouldn't notice the change, but if you do encounter busy lines, please try to access the service several times over a 15-30 minute time period before reporting a problem to the Helpdesk. - Ed. By Joe Adamo, Director of Communications ServicesUNT provides remote access facilities to its students, faculty and staff in Denton, Dallas and Fort Worth. Remote access users can choose from either standard 'free' remote access that supports dial-up speeds of up to 33.6Kbps or they can subscribe to Premium Remote Access Service (PRAS) that supports dial-up speeds of up to 56kbps. The charge for PRAS is currently $45 per semester. When PRAS was approved, it was agreed that a 7:1
subscriber to line ratio would be maintained in order to ensure
subscribers access to the lines. Currently there are 165 access lines (7
T1s) installed in Denton, 48 access lines (2 T1s) installed in Dallas
and 12 access lines installed in Fort Worth for a total of 225 access
lines. Using the 7:1 ratio, the 225 access lines will support up to 1575
subscribers, but we currently have only 732 subscribers to PRAS The
number of PRAS subscribers varies each semester but has continued to
drop over the years due to the many alternatives (commercial dial-up
providers, DSL, cable, dorm Ethernet connections) that are available to
them, we felt, therefore, that an analysis and reconfiguration of this
service was warranted. |