This Line is Busy, Please Try Again

For students living off-campus, the information superhighway is at a standstill in rush-hour traffic, with an accident up around the bend. Most just get out of their cars and wait.

Busy signals are the last thing students want to experience when they are trying to get online in order to do last minute research for a paper. Unfortunately, for hundreds of University of Oregon students living off-campus, this is a daily frustration. Many routinely get busy signals from their computer's modem as they try to get onto their University-provided internet accounts and carry out simple tasks such as checking email, visiting a professor's website, or doing important school work. Why does this problem occur so often?

According to the Fall 1999 issue of UO Computing News there are an approximate 384 modems serving off-campus students. To get online, an off-campus student, staff, or faculty member must dial a UOnet phone number (such as 346-6520) through their computer's modem to connect to one of the school's modems. Depending on the availability of these modems, a student's computer will eventually connect to the internet.

Just dialing up one of these numbers does not guarantee an instant connection for a student. All of the school's modems can only handle one student's modem at a time. This means that with 384 modems, only 384 students can gain off-campus access to the Internet at one time. "Modems transmit and receive data by converting it into an analog signal and transmitting over a phone line," explains computer science major Tim Burris of Lehigh University. "Just as you get confused when two people are talking to you about two completely different subjects at the same time, a modem cannot handle talking to more than one modem at a time." With thousands of students not living in the 24-hour, ethernet connected dorms, this can lead to major problems for off-campus students trying to access the internet through the University.

Not all of the Computing Center's modems are considered top of the line. The majority of the modems are V.90 (56Kbps or 56 kilobits per second), which is the fastest standard modem form available on the market. These modems are the current industry standard and most major computer manufacturers include them in their newer computers. The older and slower V.34+ (which include 56K Flux and 33.6Kbps) make up the second-fastest groups of modems. The rest of the modems in the UOnet modem pool are the less frequently used V.34 (28.8 Kbps), V32bis (14.4 Kbps), and V.32 (9.6 Kbps) modems. According to the Computing Center's Dial-in Modem Numbers Page there are 192 56Kbps modems, 64 33.6 Kbps modems, and 64 14.4 Kbps modems.

In the UO Computing News Fall issue, there are plans to improve the UOnet modem pool in the first months of the 1999 Fall Term. These plans include an upgrade of the V.32bis (14.4Kbps) modems to that of the fastest V.90. These changes, if implemented, will not improve the ability of students living outside of the University of Oregon campus to connect to UO net, only the speed at which they will be connected once they are online. "I usually click on 'connect' on my computer and then leave the room for ten minutes," says education major Nichole Best, "then I come back to see if I'm finally connected. Hopefully I eventually get online, but if I don't, I hit 'connect' again and take off for another ten minutes."

The $65 dollar per semester technology fee that is charged to each student helps the Computing Center maintain off-campus internet access. For such limited internet access, many students believe that this fee should be reduced. According to sources at Oregon Hall, most of this money is allocated to computing labs on campus, such as the one located in the EMU. The fee is used to purchase new computers, printing paper and other materials for the labs. At most, only 3% of the fee is put into the Computing Center's off-campus modems. With more money going into the computer labs and less going into the modem pool, and unless changes are made, we'll be hearing those busy signals for many more months-or years-to come.