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In preparation for the new David Eccles School of Business complex, 11,000 campus telephone lines must be rerouted. Qwest will begin on approximately August 3 by laying new cable.  They will then begin a splicing job that will switch the telephone numbers from the old cable to the new cable. Qwest anticipates that the job will take at least three weeks and they will run concurrent 24 hour shifts to complete the job.

During this period, buildings west of the Eccles Broadcast Center will be impacted. OIT will be working with Qwest to minimize service disruptions.  If you do experience any service issues, please call the Campus Help Desk at 801-581-4000 option 1 to enter a trouble ticket. 

Networks are critical to the basic functions of each college and department at the University of Utah.  Departments are finding it more difficult and expensive to manage their data network infrastructure. IT managers are finding themselves stretched or overwhelmed trying to do it all. In response to these needs, OIT Network Operations and Services (NetOps) is now providing 24/7/365 infrastructure monitoring and notification, problem resolution and disaster remediation services to departments. 

The goal of the Complete Network Care service is to optimize networks and prevent problems before they occur through upfront investment in time and labor to assess the network, replace old equipment, and set up the systems and processes needed.  There is a monthly fee for this service that varies by annual cost of internal support, equipment replacement cost & number of network ports.  For more information, please see http://www.it.utah.edu/services/networking/completecare.html or contact an OIT Account Executive at komas-oit-acctexecs@lists.utah.edu.

To ready campus for a known threat to our current encryption protocol and prepare for the next level of wireless transport technology (802.11n), there will be some big changes taking place in the next few weeks to the main wireless campus network.   The current encrypted, authenticated ‘uconnect.utah.edu’ network is going to be replaced with one that uses a stronger security standard and can handle the throughput that 802.11n offers.  In fact, the new network is available now.  If you look in your laptop or mobile device’s list of available wireless networks (while on campus), you should see “UConnect.”  To complete the one-time configuration to use the new network, simply use our UConnect Setup Wizard at http://setup.utah.edu/UConnect.  It’s quick and easy, and painless – the Wizard does it all for you!  Just enter your uNID and password once, and you’ll be ready to use the UConnect network immediately.  The “old” uconnect.utah.edu network will go away forever on August 14th, 2009. 

As fall semester progress, you’ll note a faster wireless experience with UConnect as wireless access points are being replaced all over campus with those that can support the new transport method.   If your device supports 802.11n, you’ll see data throughput rates of up to 50 Mbps, or even faster.  Do you work on upper and lower campus?  You will use UConnect in the same way all over campus now. 

The last big change is that our unencrypted, unauthenticated visitor network, ‘hotspot.utah.edu,’ is also being replaced.  To help make the purpose of this network more clear – for visitors of the U who don’t have a uNID or gNID – we are renaming it UGuest.  On August 14th, you will no longer see ‘hotspot.utah.edu’ as an available wireless network, but you will see UGuest.   Questions?  Call the Campus Help Desk at 801-581-4000.

– by Starlee Holman

For students living in Housing & Residential Education and University Student Apartments, an emergency on campus may call for a specific response.  To make information easier to distribute and more specific, Administrative Computing Services (an OIT department) has completed a project enabling campus housing administrators to send out phone, SMS & email alerts to their residents.

“The alerts will be used for health and safety messages only,” said Barb Remsburg, Director of Housing & Residential Education. This new alert system is a subset of the Campus Alert System.  Some alerts will be specific to only the housing areas, and other “messages will be a follow-up to a campus alert system message, with information that’s pertinent for students regarding their housing,” said Remsburg.

Students who would like to sign up for the alert system can sign up for the Campus Alert System in the Campus Information System (CIS).  Residents of student housing will then receive alerts from campus as well as housing.