Vanessa Gentry 12/4/2015 Ben Byrnes Improving Internet Quality at Longwood

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1 Michael Lee White Paper Vanessa Gentry 12/4/2015 Ben Byrnes Improving Internet Quality at Longwood Abstract In the modern information age, the importance of having a proper internet connection has increased to the point that it is practically considered a basic utility. Without a good connection it becomes far more difficult to perform basic tasks, like advertising your business or conducting research on a subject. In a university setting, the internet is an indispensable commodity for furthering the student's learning, facilitating communications between students and teachers, and even for making the submission and grading of assignments less complex. Since a good internet connection has become so integral to university life, this paper will investigate the condition of the current internet connections available at Longwood University, explore the features of other available services, and determine which option would be the best to use for Longwood University's service. Problem Statement Many problems have arisen as a result of the current state of the network connection at Longwood University. The current connection is often slow and unreliable, which reduces the productivity of students working in an online environment. The lack of reliability is particularly damaging because it can cause pages to fail in the middle of a download or a submission, forcing the students to have to restart the process or corrupting the file without the student noticing. The slow connection is also troublesome because it can cause many routine tasks that the student must constantly perform to become very time consuming. Figure 1: Internet service provided by colleges Another problem students have encountered with the current internet service is that the customer service quality is rather low. The information on how to perform basic tasks and diagnostics including how to create an account with Shentel is not documented properly on their main web page. Additionally, attempts to reach them by calling their customer service line or ing them about a problem are problematic because it can take quite a large amount of time to get a response from a person. Finally, Shentel and Longwood have unclear regulations regarding their network service. They fail to specify the number of devices that should be connected to the network and which devices students should be allowed to use, causing the bandwidth of the network to be limited from the large number of devices on the network. Network routers in particular tend to take away a good portion of the bandwidth and slow down the network for others. Even if the other concerns are addressed the internet service could still be problematic if this problem is not resolved.

2 Solution Connection Speed and Reliability To make the network more capable of handling the large amount of traffic it sees from the many students at this university and speeding up the connection, we need to increase the number of access points to the network that are available in each dormitory and increase the bandwidth of our connection. Bandwidth is a measure of how quickly data can be transferred across a network, and the number of access points determines how many devices can be connected to unique ports to the internet. With fewer access points more devices will be forced to connect to the same point and have to share the bandwidth available. Additionally, increasing the service provided will decrease the strain on the network, reducing the chances of it crashing. Customer Service To improve the quality of Shentel s feedback we recommend that they increase the detail of their FAQ pages on their main website, increase the staff that they have available for responding to calls and s, and further the training of their staff. The FAQ pages are important to expand because they are useful for fixing small, common problems quickly, but the customer service representatives are also necessary for dealing with more unusual and complex problems. Expanding the FAQ pages in a useful way could be achieved through multiple methods. One way to collect data on the most common problems would be to survey current users to see what problems they recall having encountered during their time with Shentel. Alternatively, Shentel could just make note of problems that the service desks fixes and identify recurring problems. The survey method has the advantage of being able to notice problems that are small enough that the user doesn t call them in and just puts up with them or found their own way to solve them, but collecting call data has the advantage of requiring less money and effort to complete. Once common problems are identified, they should determine a solution to the problem that will work for most customers and add the problem and solution to their FAQ page. Any additional solutions found later that address an additional part of the customer base should also be added to the page. Increasing Regulation Figure 3: Internet speed test Longwood should supply a series of clear rules that reduce the amount of unnecessary traffic on the network. These regulations should address devices that can cause more bandwidth problems and devices that could create security vulnerabilities, speeding up the connection for students and decreasing the chance of the network being taken down from an attack. How this solves the problem Increasing Bandwidth and Access Points In our technology age, each individual has multiple devices. Researchers have found that 41% of students usually have three or more devices connected to the internet at one time. With the limited number of access points, it is hard to give reliable service to all of those devices. By increasing the

3 number of access points around the dorms and apartments we can reduce the number of devices connected to each access point and thus reduce the strain on the network. With 76% of colleges struggling to meet bandwidth demands, it comes to no surprise that Longwood is facing issues themselves. 73% of colleges report that students are requesting better internet to keep up with their demands. Currently 28.9% of colleges have around 10 Mbps (megabits per second) bandwidth access. To show how much bandwidth is used, streaming one Netflix movie uses roughly 3.8 Mbps out of the 10 provided by our current service. CenturyLink and LancerNet are the competitor services to Shentel. Century provides the same services as Shentel but less bandwidth. LancerNet can handle the bandwidth for the classrooms if every student were to connect a device, but it cannot handle streaming or excessive downloading. Even with adding access point and increasing bandwidth, a university will have to continue to do that with the needs of technology continuously advancing. This solution will help for a few years but since smart device use is expected to continue to increase, there is only so much bandwidth can do. Another possible problem is the cost of expanding the network. The addition of access points will require a large initial investment, and increasing the bandwidth will greatly increase the monthly cost of Shentel s service. Students will have to be willing to accept an increase in the cost of their rooming if they want to have faster internet available to them. If Longwood upgrades their services, the additional cost to both the university and to the students will have to be factored into their considerations. However, we believe that the current level of service is inadequate for the university s needs and Longwood should be willing to invest in improving the connection. Expanding FAQs and Increasing Customer Service Staff By improving the quality and breadth of the FAQ section of Shentel s website, it will become far less difficult for users to diagnose and treat any connection difficulties they have. When they experience difficulties with Shentel s services, they will be able to access the website, using another connection if need be, and see if their problem falls under any of the provided problems. With a larger FAQ section, their problem will often be within the scope of one of the discussions, so they will be able to navigate to that section and read the prescribed solution to their problem. Optimally, this will allow many users to solve their problems with Shentel s services on their own, saving a large amount of time that would be wasted trying to contact customer service. Increasing the training and number of available customer service staff will greatly increase Shentel s response time to non-typical problems that fall outside the scope of their prepared FAQ section. The increased training will increase the accuracy of the representative s diagnosis of the problem, reducing

4 the number of steps they will have to go through to attempt to solve the problem, allowing user s problems to be solved far more quickly. Having more staff available to answer calls will both reduce the wait time for each user when they call in to customer service and increase the amount of time the operator has to deal with each customer. This will reduce the stress on the operator, allowing them to make more clear judgements and letting them make sure that their suggested solution truly is working before ending the call, increasing the speed and quality of their service. The largest problem with attempting to resolve the customer service problems through these plans is that the cost of hiring extra workers will be very high and a large amount of time will be wasted on additional training. The customer service desk cannot be improved without any costs of this sort, and this method is not particurally wasteful, but neither is it particurally cheap and simple to implement. Shentel needs to be willing to make the trade off in cost and effectiveness for this to work. However, the FAQ pages are cost effective to improve, so even if Shentel decides not to improve their service desk quality they should at least improve those. Regulating the Network By increasing the regulations on the network, Longwood can make it more difficult for students to lower the quality of the connection for themselves and others in the dorm. For example, the usage of routers is problematic because routers consume a large amount of the network s bandwidth and cause everything connected through them to be sharing one access point s service, lowering the effective bandwidth of the connection for anyone who attempts to use the router. Additionally, depending on the router used, routers can cause security holes in the network, making systems on the network more vulnerable to attacks that could disable the systems or allow the attacker to gain personal information that the person attacked would not want made public, like their social security number or bank account information. Regulating the network can also decrease the usage of the network for non-academic purposes, particularly during times of high usage and during finals week. Certain systems, like gaming consoles which are clearly not academic or smartphones that have another method for connecting to the internet, could be dropped from the network during high usage times to make sure that service is still being provided to students that are using the connection for academic means. This would also motivate students to rely on the provided internet less for these devices and possibly decrease their internet usage on these devices, freeing up more bandwidth for other devices to use. While regulating the internet may seem limiting to the students, it is far more helpful than harmful to their internet experience. The students may want to connect their own router for familiarity purposes, but since all residence halls now come equipped with wireless routers, the main reason for students to use routers is already fulfilled. The possible problems with routers far outweighs the benefit to the students with the current situation. Similarly, it is understandable that students would want to keep their non-academic devices connected all the time without having to worry about being kicked from the internet in the middle of a download or during an online match in a video game, but a university should prioritize academics over amusement, as the students should be able to understand.

5 Conclusion Due to the essential need for Longwood students to have a fast, reliable internet connection, we conclude that in order to meet the current and future internet, Longwood must make sure that the quality of their current internet connection is improved. To facilitate the consumer needs of Longwood, the number of access ports to the network must be increased and the available bandwidth must also be improved. This will take off a large amount of stress off of the network, increase the internet speed greatly, and allow for more devices to be used. Additionally, Longwood must revise their terms of use and make them more available so that students know what they are and are not allowed to do on Shentel s network. Also, to better handle the customer service side of the company Shentel must develop and improve their FAQ web page and provide better training to their customer service hotline. Improving the quality of the customer service hotline and modifying the FAQ website will allow students experiencing network troubles to get useful help in a timelier manner. Once these services are improved by the proposed solutions, students will be able to have a fast and reliable internet connection to work on assignments and browse the web, making them more productive.

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