Excited for faster and stronger internet? USF IT has recently completed a 100-gigabyte upgrade to its connection with the Florida LambdaRail (FLR).
This significant upgrade connects our existing fiber ring across the Tampa Bay area (Tampa Campus, Downtown Tampa, St. Petersburg*) and provides the University community with ten times the bandwidth, compared to our original 10G connection. This upgrade also included changes that provide stronger resiliency and more uptime by building geographically separate connections from USF to FLR.
This improves wired and wireless internet service to faculty and students in the classroom and other learning spaces during peak periods. Preliminary December and January data shows the upgrade has removed high traffic bottlenecks and that the network is already allowing higher activity than our previous 10G limit provided.
Additionally, university researchers who are sharing large amounts of data and collaborating with partners both across the university system and out-of-state will benefit greatly from this bandwidth expansion.
“An R1 institution like USF needs to ensure that our faculty have the fastest possible connections to the internet and USF is fortunate to have employees with the deep technical expertise in optical networks that is required to build this type of network,” said Sidney Fernandes, CIO of USF Information Technology. “This in-house expertise meant the team was able to do this without bringing in external resources to accomplish this upgrade and did it without downtime for our clients.”
For more information on the Florida Lambdarail, please visit https://www.flrnet.org/. For more information on USF Information Technology and the services we provide, visit http://www.usf.edu/ITHub
*The St. Petersburg portion of the Ring is a 10 GB connection but can be upgraded depending on demand