One of the challenges West Point faced was its growing dependency on bandwidth to perform daily tasks and the stark difference between West Point and the rest of the Army in this regard. Our primary connection to the internet was a 45 Mbps DS3 connection. Our backup connection was a 1.5 Mbps T1 circuit. Our primary connection was overwhelmed everyday and our backup circuit was laughable.
Your primary and backup connections to the Internet should be the same size. They should be tested regularly unless you like being fired.
The prevailing wisdom was this was all the fault of the cadets and they should spend less time on Facebook. Various strategies were proposed to prioritize traffic all of which were just stupid. I went against the tide and suggested we just fix the plumbing. I was ultimately successful and we upgraded the primary and backup connections to 155 Mbps OC3 circuits. To my dismay, the connections were overwhelmed with traffic immediately. Apparently, we had underestimated how bad the internet plumbing was.
Don’t blame the customer for trying to do their job. Make it easy for the customer to do their job safely.
After everyone triple-checked the results and concluded we still had a significant bandwidth issue, we increased the primary and secondary bandwidth to 655 Mbps OC12 circuits. West Point consumed slightly more than 400 Mbps of bandwidth during peak usage which was about 15 hours of the day. We had fixed the bandwidth issue at West Point and not surprisingly, productivity and happiness surged as the cadets and faculty could be much more efficient and productive in their daily tasks as knowledge workers. The Army agreed with the results but were not happy with the costs. OC12 circuits were expensive in 2004 and while West Point was very much a portend of things to come, the Army just saw it as expensive during a time of war.
We had a secondary plumbing issue with our wireless networks. Everyone liked wifi and wanted to use it in our closely packed classrooms. In 2004, this was a difficult problem to solve as there are only a limited number of channels available. West Point was having significant interference issues because of the lack of channels. We were able to resolve this with some pretty nuanced and neat network engineering that I will omit as it will immediately put a normal reader to sleep. West Point won a 2005 Most Wired University award as a result of these efforts.
I was not successful in getting targeted network services into periodic hotspots like Trophy Point or Michie Stadium. I did try but the technology was not quite ripe and I had already spent a good bit of political capital to fix the plumbing. It would have to be a task for the next CIO.
If you are progressing through this journey sequentially, the next chapter is Move to the Sound of the Guns.