Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. This old adage can be applied to modern situations, even of a technical nature, such as the Office of Information Technologies' two failed attempts to install a new Internet connection.
Early Sunday morning, OIT activated this new connection only to have it fail three hours later; the backup connection used slowed Internet on campus to a crawl. Tuesday morning, OIT tried again to activate the connection and it failed two hours later.
While OIT and the University should be commended for their attempts to increase the University's Internet bandwidth, the failures encountered exhibit a lack of necessary testing and preparation for the switchover. And OIT's blind faith in the Internet vendor's promise that they had fixed the problem when they attempted to activate the connection a second time 48 hours later is unacceptable.
Seniors, faculty and anyone else who has been on campus for at least four years painfully remember the 2000-01 academic year that was marred by multiple, long-lasting Internet outages that crippled campus computing. Since then, Internet outages have been few and far between.
But the University's decision to install a new connection that has failed twice in the five hours it was active raises questions about whether Internet reliability is returning to the days of old.
OIT is now carefully reviewing its plans and meeting with the Internet vendor to ensure that the next upgrade will be a success. But one has to wonder why it took two failures to cause this review.
