NWU is expanding the current Wi-Fi infrastructure and full coverage to all NWU on-campus student residences. This project aims to facilitate and develop BYOD for students on the main campus and in residences.

In hindsight, Willem Fick, consultant project manager, informed us that the current wifi infrastructure was installed ten years ago. But Covid happened and gave a whole new dimension to wifi connectivity and the associated convenience. In other words, when NWU staff returned to work, they realized wifi was convenient. You can be mobile, sit outside if the weather allows, and perform your daily tasks there. As head of Eskom’s IT, Willem mentioned that he did precisely that and found that people saw him more accessible than when he was in his office. Wifi brings about exciting scenarios. In the NWU’s case, we know during the period of Covid, it was not allowable to pack the lecture room to the brim as in the past. That gave rise to online classes and video recordings. With total capacity students back on campus, the bandwidth intensity that it will bring about our current wifi network will not be able to support it.

“If we consider the technology trajectory for tertiary institutions, NWU is also adhering to the changes, in other words, starting to move towards a hybrid environment. The goal is to create an invisible network cable. Meaining the network cable can be extended from anywhere on campus, even to any virtual place. A good example is MIT which presents its course material online. To be able to set the same goal, we have to start by our campus and progress from there on; for that, we have to put a few things in place first,” says Willem.

Those mentioned above forced us to use a different approach.  There is more availability of equipment that make up the inner ring.  We found wifi switches, routers, and quality equipment, but we decided to buy them due to scarcity and the considerable demand.  

Improvements

1. Network optimization will be in the scope. It will not bring about a day and night differences to the user, but it will enhance the throughput to the outer edge from the central server.

2. While we are busy, we also want to alleviate entropy. Entropy is defined as a measure of randomness or disorder of a system. We want to sort out the data systems by wires that are no longer in use and should be discarded. Equipment should be shelved and barcoded properly. The barcode scanning will also serve as a quality control method to gauge if the job request has been satisfactory.

3. We are also looking into streamlining process work. It was not initially part of the project layout but organically found its way to us. While amid equipment shortages, we decided to look closely at some of the IT processes, discard those that do not work, and unravel the current workarounds.

4. A big motivator is thus optimizing the network as much as possible; then, it would be possible to add new technology that would, in the end, make a meaningful difference. 

This substantial difference will be rolled out to residences, staff, and guests, meaning that everyone will receive equally good connectivity. Unfortunately, we cannot call it a bleeding edge at this stage due to what we have available in the country and what money allows for.

The NWU requires a system that optimises the Student Academic Lifecycle Administration (SALA). The project works to address the SALA system change requirements through a new responsive technological solution in alignment with the Digital Business Strategy of the university. The main goal of the project is to implement a modern, fit-for-purpose Student Information System (SIS) and service that supports and aligns with the NWU digital strategic intent. The solution has to be flexible enough to accommodate the changing unitary business model and business process needs, support changes in statutory and sector demands, support all modes of delivery to serve students, academics and administrators in a cost-effective way.

"Anthology has been selected to provide the new SIS software solution which will be identified as “NWU Student”.   

Targeted teamwork will drive initiatives to enable a more integrated, transparent and customer centric NWU in realisation of these objectives;

"Prior to moving, we were located on the second floor of building F20, which formed part of the call centre.
To facilitate accessibility and more efficient service delivery, it was decided to designate a dedicated space for our NWU staff.
We received assistance from the Department of Marketing and Student Recruitment in 'dressing us in a new jacket.'
Branding helps users to associate themselves with a service or product. If you have strong branding, people will naturally take note of it. In our instance, the NWU personnel had a difficult time locating the door to our staff walk-in service. A department that doesn’t have any cohesive branding isn’t going to stay in someone’s mind for very long ." Informed Mr. Thys Snyman, Head: Student Support Services.

The North-West University (NWU) internet and cross-campus connectivity are provided by making use of a dedicated national research and education network that is operated by the Tertiary Education and Research Network of South Africa (TENET) with the CSIR-hosted South African Research Network (SANReN) in charge of its rollout and the incubation of services that run on the network. Multiple Universities in South Africa are part of this national research and education network. This ensures that collaboration between universities can be done over a high-speed, reliable, and redundant network.

The NWU continuously collaborates and negotiates with the CSIR, SANReN and TENET to improve connectivity and redundancy between the three campuses of the NWU. One of the outcomes of this is the redundant ring network, as depicted by the link. “NWU IT does everything within its means to ensure a high-speed, stable and reliable internet experience as well as cross-campus connectivity for NWU users,” says Flip van Schalkwyk, Senior Manager: IT-Operations and Infrastructure.

The redundant ring network between the three campuses ensures that redundancy is in place, should a link fail between the campuses, an alternative backup link is available to ensure service delivery to a specific campus. It is highly unlikely for a campus to be isolated from the SANReN network.

 

The SANReN network provides the University with the following.

• a core national dark fibre backbone with several managed bandwidth backbone links at 100Gbps (in progress),

• backbone extensions (regional links) – typically at 10Gbps,

• back-hauling from the submarine cable landing stations at Yzerfontein and Mtunzini,

• capacity on five undersea cables, and

• several metropolitan area networks.

Despite the monitoring of the network by the network operator, TENET, the network is also monitored by the NWU IT department. The monitoring of the network and associated connectivity is done 24*7*365. TENET focuses on monitoring the physical links, throughput, and performance of multiple links while the NWU also focus on the monitoring of user experience and services dependent on connectivity. Open communication exists between the NWU IT, SANReN, and TENET teams to report on link outages, degraded services, upgrades, and maintenance that could impact performance.

TENET reports and manages link outages with the various national dark fibre providers. Link outages are restored within a reasonable timeframe. Industrial and protest actions at times cause delays with the restoration of links, fortunately, the redundant configuration in the topology of the network ensures that these delays are not service-impacting for the user community of the NWU.