Keeping up with campus demands for electronic communication capacity remains a major challenge for the Network & Academic Computing Services. In six years, UCInet has grown from less than 300 registered hosts (computers with a registered IP address) to more than 9,000 registered hosts today. This is greater than the number of telephones on the campus! The number of students with an Educational Access (EA) computer account has grown from less than 500 in 1989 to nearly every student at UCI as of the end of Spring 1996 (over 14,000). Faculty and staff with an e-mail account with NACS has grown from less than 100 to more than 3,000 in only three years. All of these and other users of UCInet generate a lot of network traffic!
Last year, NACS invested approximately $400,000 to upgrade the optical fiber UCInet backbone to accommodate future communication technologies such as ATM. This year, NACS will invest another $150,000 to upgrade some of the older electronics on UCInet. Future investments during the next few years will likely exceed $1 million as capacity is expanded to meet demand for more bits/second.
Access to the Internet is also becoming more expensive. In one year, UCI’s cost of Internet access has increased from $17,000 to approximately $140,000. There are two reasons; user demand for more bandwidth, and the “privatization” of the national network. Transfer of large data sets among researchers, desktop video communication, and thousands of UCI faculty, staff and students downloading graphic, audio and video files from the World Wide Web will most likely require annual increases in the bandwidth of our access to the Internet.
In an attempt to constrain the growth of the cost of Internet access, all nine campuses are discussing a common strategy for obtaining reliable access at low cost. The combined buying power of the University of California hopefully will reduce costs for each campus.
This summer, NACS has been updating its long range electronic communication plan (now know as UCInet 2001). Important components of this plan will be shared through future editions of this newsletter.
William Parker
Director, Network & Academic Computing Services
WHParker@uci.edu