One of the great unknowns about Internet service is no matter how much bandwidth is offered to an organization the size of Baylor University, chances are it will eventually not be enough to meet the university’s needs. For this reason, Baylor’s Internet bandwidth just recently increased from 300 Mbs to 500 Mbs.  Implemented the week before school started, the increase actually came about because ITS was looking for a way to obtain a redundant (or secondary) link to the Internet while ensuring back-up service was available to the campus.

“The options were either increasing existing capacity with our current provider or to bring in a secondary provider,” said Bob Hartland, director of IT Servers & Networks.  “We had saved enough money in the renegotiation of our existing Internet1 contract to build a secondary link that not only provides redundancy, it increased our overall bandwidth.”

This secondary link will be provided by Grande Communications, and hopefully, faculty and staff “will find less contention in using the Internet for those applications needed to perform their jobs,” Hartland said. “This was a significant step forward in providing better service to Baylor in the areas of uptime and reliability.”