I am just shocked when I happened to know the bandwidth rates in United States and India.
India
United States
We pay $62000/$1100 ~ 50 times more and that too for less resources. What a world we live in 🙂
After a struggle of months if not years, I can see things moving finally. A big big credit goes to Rishabh Mukherjee, who was always there to offer his help whenever I had a problem with administration ( specific to IT infrastructure at IIIT). Yesterday, there was a meeting in which a test plan was worked out for the newly arrived access points for the OBH extension block. For a few weeks, they’ll be tested in one of the OBH wings and the performance will be logged. Also, a lot of changes will be seen in IT infrastructure at IIIT in near future. Now plans are coming out of meeting rooms and they are not limited to papers and emails anymore. A big thanks for Shatrunjay Sir for this.
I was proud to know that IIIT was the only academic institute in India to have wifi campus when I joined IIIT. Back then wifi offered good connectivity and bandwidth on Intranet and it was a feel good that you don’t have to look for wires to go online. Sit anywhere with your laptop and you are ready to go online.
As time passed, the no. of students using wifi increased due to huge intake of students in different branches. The wifi infrastructure which provided a speed of 20MBps per user at some point of time is now like a 56kbps modem line which you won’t prefer if you are not out of options. Apart from the decreased bandwidth per user, other problems arose in course of time like the switches grew older, UPSs lost their efficiency etc.
The funniest part of wifi infrastructure currently are these UPSs. They are attached to each and every switch in hostels. Whenever power goes down, the UPS also goes down and start screaming as if they are designed to kill everyone in the vicinity. The backup they provide is hardly a minute or so (not more than two minutes surely). These UPSs are so intelligent that whenever power comes, they can’t sense it and they need to be restarted. I would like to congratulate the designer to make such high class UPSs to make our life miserable. So, we have UPSs that goes down immediately on power cut and needs to be restarted when power is back. The only advantage of having these UPSs is that our life is miserable.
Another fun part is NBH(New Boys Hostel, one of the hostels at IIIT campus) switch. This 3Com switch is too old to sustain the peak data transfers. This switch goes down every 3-4 hours and needs to be restarted manually using a hard reboot ( hard reboot means cutting the power supply and then restoring it.). This switch is kept in a locked room and whenever one has to restart it, he has to look around for the key in cellar.
I am afraid that due to the continuously increasing load, some day entire wifi will collapse and we will have serious wireless crisis at IIIT. Students Lab Committee is trying hard to convince people around to come up with alternate solutions. I hope we will have some solutions soon.
PS : No PSs this time 🙂