Over the last few months the ResNet team have been working with A2Dominion and cabling contractors on a plan to install ResNet Wireless in Deans Court.  Starting on Friday 18th November our contractors will be on-site installing cabling
and 30 Wireless Access Points to flat hallways - access should not be required to your room so the disruption should be minimal.

We do not have a completion date but hope the installation will be completed before the end of the term (16th December 2011).

Adding wireless to Deans Court will increase Residential wireless coverage from 68% to just over 75%

For more information on ResNet Wireless please visit <http://www.resnet.bristol.ac.uk/wireless>

This post will be updated with any useful information as and when we have some.

 Update 09-12-2011
All cables have been installed but only some have been terminated. Swicthes are installed. We are a waiting for completion of cable termination which we expect to be next week. Looks like we are on target for completion by the end of this term

 Update 20-12-2011
The installation of Wireless ResNet was completed late last week and 28 of the 30 access points are now up and we've seen over 60 people using them already. We are looking into fixing the two that have never come alive either today or tomorrow. We hope you enjoy using Wireless ResNet.

While we already compare favourably with commercial broadband providers (on price, speed and bandwidth quotas) there's always room for improvement - so we're rethinking how much bandwidth we give you on ResNet.

Making your usage quota easier to understand

Currently you have two bandwidth quotas, one for off-peak and one for on-peak times of day.  Going over either quota lands you in a slow network for the rest of the week - at all times of day. This is confusing, and terribly inconvenient if you want to skype your friends back home during peak hours...

So, we're getting rid of peak-time!

We've combined the on and off peak quotas to give you a single quota of 48GB per week (For ResNet Standard) or 81GB per week (For ResNet Max) - no more worrying what time it is!

We've been trialling this change since 23rd May and it's been going pretty well so far.  The My ResNet control panel, and the Bandwidth Gadgets don't fully know about the change yet, so your on-peak usage is being reported as zero.  If the trial continues to work out ok, we'll have to see about fixing that!

If 81GB per week isn't enough for you, you can still buy extra chunks of quota through My ResNet.

Making your connection even faster!

Not content with making things easier, we're making them faster too!

Starting Monday 13th, we're going to increase the speed of ResNet wired connections to 50Mbps symmetric - That's 50Mbps download speed, and 50Mbps upload speed.  Once we've made that change, ResNet connections will be faster than BT Infinity Broadband (which gives you 40Mbps download speed, and 10Mbps upload)

Why is this awesome?  (Apart from it being obvious that faster is better!)

Well it means you can take full advantage of cloud based storage/backup solutions such as iCloud, Windows Live SkyDrive or Ubuntu One. It makes uploading photos or video to facebook/vimeo/flickr/youtube super quick, but most importantly - whatever cool new internet functionality is coming round the corner, we want your ResNet connection to be ready to handle it.

At this stage, we're not making any changes to the speed of the wireless network.  We can make it a bit faster than it is at the moment, but we can't make it quite as fast as the wired network.  So to take full advantage of the speed boost you'll need to use your wired connection.

"With great power comes great responsibility" - Spiderman

Once your connection is faster than a very fast thing going downhill on rollerskates - it does mean that it's easier to use up all your bandwidth quota.  We've done some sums and we think a bittorrent client serving up something popular (like an Ubuntu Linux DVD image) left unchecked could rip through the ResNet Max weekly limit in under 4 hours - on upload traffic alone!

If you've got any filesharing software on your computer, you might want to limit how much it can upload to the internet.  Most programs allow you to specify a maximum upload speed - we suggest setting this as low as you can get away with!

Not-that-small-really smallprint: All the features mentioned above are being trialled, we reserve the right to end the trial at any time if things start to melt.  We'll make a decision about what next years network speeds look like based on the results of the trial, so the above features may or may not be available for the 2011-2012 academic year.

Oh, and they apply to ResNet only.  The VisitorNet service got an 8 fold increase about a month ago but that's as far as we can push that for the moment.

Questions?

If you've got any questions or comments about the trials mentioned above, hit the comments below!

We've got a new version of the ResNet bandwidth quota monitoring sidebar gadget, which fixes a problem experienced by Windows Vista and Windows 7 users, where the gadget refused to accept their keys.

If you tried the sidebar gadget and it didn't work, upgrade to the latest version from http://toys.resnet.bris.ac.uk and give it another go!

We've been experiencing some problems with the ResNet Wireless service at Northwell House and Winkworth House.  The wired service, and wireless access in other locations around the university are not affected.

There are two distinct issues, which have combined to cause a rather complicated and confusing result, so much so that I'm not really sure how best to describe the situation!

The main symptoms people have been seeing are:

• The wireless connectivity became unstable (we think on Monday, but possibly over the weekend), meaning that peoples wireless connections were unreliable.
• The wireless bandwidth accounting encountered a problem and started counting peoples traffic multiple times, leading to people being cut off for going over their quota - without them actually doing so.

We've made some changes to the wireless network which we think will improve the stability again, hopefully returning us to normal service stability, and we're busy fixing the bandwidth accounting.

We are picking our way through those who are affected by the accounting issue, restoring their bandwidth quotas and putting things back to normal.  Until we've completed this work, Wireless ResNet data isn't being updated through My ResNet or the RSS feed/bandwidth gadgets We will be emailing those affected with more details in due course.

We're really sorry for the inconvenience, especially during the exam season!

Information Services are carrying out some essential systems maintenance on the 11th August 2009, 10:00-10:30 which affects the following ResNet systems:

We've received a maintenance announcement from Freewire TV, saying that they will be carrying out some upgrade work on Wednesday 1st April 2009 between 1100 and 1500.

This maintenance has been scheduled so that Inuk Networks Infrastructure can upgrade the encoders used for broadcasting the channels listed below.

Setanta Sports News
Setanta Sports 2
Setanta Sports Golf
Arsenal
Liverpool
Celtic
Rangers
ESPN America

Maintenance Schedule
Maintenance Start: 11.00 on Wednesday 1st April 2009
Maintenance End: 15.00 on Wednesday 1st April 2009
Maintenance Window: 4 hours
Planned Downtime: 30 mins per channel

For the last two weeks we have been logging users' wireless ResNet usage and have just made this viewable (if you have any) via MyResNet

Because wireless, unlike wired, ResNet usage includes internal usage we are not yet including this in your weekly allowance - it's just for information.  We will be monitoring wireless usage to make sure it's not being abused by individuals.  We believe that our wired weekly usage allowance is very generous, so excessive use of the wireless should not be necessary.

We've just been informed by freewire that they will be doing some maintenance on the TV service this Wednesday, it shouldn't cause any problems but we thought we'd warn you all just incase. details as follows:

Maintenance Details
This work has been scheduled so that Inuk Networks can upgrade the User Interface component of the IPTV platform. This improvement will enable future VoD menu features to the Freewire Television service.

Whilst we believe that this work will be completed within the specified times, we feel it prudent to make customers aware that this work is planned.

We do not expect there to be any interruption in your Freewire services.

Maintenance Schedule
Maintenance Start: 10.00 on Wednesday 14th May 2008
Maintenance End: 11.00 on Wednesday 14th May 2008
Maintenance Window: 1 hour
Planned Downtime: No impact.

We're getting reports that the freewire IPTV client on Windows Vista is encouraging people to upgrade to the latest version (2.1.2.0) - and then failing to work with the following error message:

The problem seems to only affect some Windows Vista users.

We have found a (temporary) workaround. The "freewire lite" client doesn't seem to show the same problems, although it is missing some of the features of the full version of the client. So if there's something you desperately need to watch tonight, that may be an option.

You may like to contact the freewire helpdesk yourself. Contact information for the freewire helpdesk can be found on their website: http://freewiretv.com/helpdesk.html

We'll update this post as and when we get more information from freewire.

Update 4pm: Freewire confirm that they have seen other cases of this and their engineers are investigating. It seems to affect some but not all Vista users.

If you've looked at MyResNet recently you'll have noticed that the off-peak weekly allowance cell in the Network Usage table has changed from 'unlimited' to 35GB. Currently we are not automatically restricting users based on their off-peak usage but we are working towards this goal.

Looking at this table you should be able to work out that if either the off-peak allowance OR the on-peak allowance exceed 100% AUP then your connection will be moved into the restricted network. Clever usage will allow up to 40GB weekly traffic (35 off + 5 on).

As I said before, the off-peak allowance is not active yet, but will be in the near future. The on-peak allowance is still in operation as it has been all year.

From current usage statistics, we anticipate that less than 1% of our users will be affected by this change. For example, last week 0.56% of users transferred data in excess of 35GB off peak and the week before it was just 0.33% (although term only started on Wednesday of that week).

Currently off-peak is midnight to 6pm (18 hours) and on-peak is 6pm to midnight (6 hours).

As always, we welcome constructive feedback.