Staff members and students can look forward to enjoying the benefits of a recent major network upgrade when they return in the new academic year.
CTS Network Manager Sam Bimray said all buildings were being linked to the IT centre and Admin centre with new fibre cables, which will increase the speed and result in a major improvement in the performance of the network.
“We are also installing new equipment in different areas to take full advantage of the new fibre installation.”
He said two projects, the wired project on the Bellville campus and wireless project across all campuses, were running concurrently.
“We are trying to make our network as accessible as possible all over the campuses. We want to ensure that every building that we have has full coverage of Wi-Fi. This has been our biggest challenge. Five years ago it was one person per device but now we find that every person has two or three devices. This has required lots of upgrades, switches to more wireless routers and a new server to help us manage the increase of users.”
The department’s Joshua Blanchard said residences were one of the key focus areas: “With the help of external companies we walked through residences with a tool to check the reach of wireless coverage. We’ve looked at what we can do to get signal in the areas that are not reached.”
Bimray said a PABX Software (telephone system) upgrade was also conducted which will enable the use of Skype for business and improve voice quality on the network.
Future projects will include upgrading all the old cabling infrastructure.
