Long time, no post. Actually nothing significant happened in last one and a half month that might have been worth noticing. But something significant happened suddenly that I couldn’t stop myself from writing this post.
When I came to IIIT-H in year 2005, it has a 4Mbps backbone and a lot of users, may be around 600 or more. The browsing experience at that time was excellent. The average load time of any site was around 4-6 seconds. We used to get around 20-30kbps download speed from internet. Life was pretty easy and one need not to go to coffee shop until a site opens. But as the time passed, the no. of people @ IIIT-H started increasing and with no increment in the bandwidth. So, life became harder and harder. Then, suddenly some day the switch(i think the one of the two available, which used to route the traffic between hostels(wireless) and main building(wired)) was burnt due to some short-circuit or whatever. So, some traffic between the hostels and main building was banned(which includes DC++ traffic) because one switch can’t handle the huge traffic which IIIT-H produces in peak hours and if they allow all the traffic the other will also be burnt due to heating. So, we had a hard time. Due to increased no. of users, internet bandwidth share per user decreased and intranet traffic was also limited due to availability of just one switch.
There were time when you might have really thought of visiting coffee shop until the techtree.com(an Indian site somewhat similar to e-bay) page shows up. This was the situation for almost a year. People were hopeless. There was no other alternative except increasing the bandwidth. And thats what happened. Today we received a mail from the help desk that the bandwidth has been increased to 8Mbps. Twice!!!!! Wow!!!!! The browsing is now much more fun than it was in 2005. Average load time of any site is 2-3 seconds and that too because my PC is slow 🙁 . I have 1GB RAM and my browser still hangs when I load a no. of pages at a time, due to the fact that it can handle a specific amount of data at a time and proxy is swamping the browser with data instantly on request. I think, I have to advance with time and should get additional RAM.
There are some other significant improvements also, which are going to come into effect pretty soon. One that the burnt switch will be replaced soon. I hope that the blocked protocols between hostels and main building will be unblocked soon after that.
The other is that hostel wireless is going to localized with the help of level three switches. So, that if I want to download data from one room to my room in the same hostel, then it need not travel all the way from the other room to the main building and then back from the main building to my room. So, we hope for a better bandwidth utilization.
PS : I wrote what I could understand from the terms used in the mail by Dr. Kamal. They may have been misunderstood.
