Rockhurst University Computer Services is pleased to announce that we have partnered with Surewest Communications of Kansas City (previously Everest) to provide increased bandwidth to our campus.

Currently Rockhurst has a 20 mbps connection through The Missouri Research and Education Network (MOREnet), a public program that provides Internet connectivity to Missouri's K-12 schools, colleges and universities, public libraries, health care, state government and other affiliated organizations. Over the last few years with the growth of video on demand services like YouTube and Hulu, voice over IP services such as Skype, and the increasing general use of the Internet on our campus, we've needed to increase amount of bandwidth we have available.

The additional Surewest line, which will be added before the beginning of the fall semester, will provide 100 mbps of multiple carrier connectivity. This, in addition to our current MOREnet connection will provide a total of 120 mbps to our campus, an increase of 5X.

Having a second provider also gives us redundant capacity. Should one of our ISPs have a problem, or need to be taken offline for maintenance, the campus should still have Internet connectivity through the other provider. Also, since we're now using multiple upstream providers (AT&T, Cogent and Level 3) , we should have a more reliable connection overall. We also hope to run the fiber connections to the campus through different pathways to limit the chances that a physical disaster would take the campus offline.

We will also be installing better, more reliable and more powerful, traffic control devices on the network over the summer. This will insure that all users of our network resources have a fast and reliable connection and to help manage this additional bandwidth. Since our connection to the Internet is a resource that we all must share, it's important for us to make sure that everyone has fair and equitable use of that resource. It is also important that this resource is used in a way that is consistent with our university's mission, and in both an ethical and legal way.