The NWU Internet

Over the last few months the NWU has experienced more than its fair share of Internet outages, or more correctly, Internet slow-downs. This has led to many questions as to why?
The major reasons are: 1) Cable theft/damage and 2) Loadshedding

Although this is a South African problem in general, the NWU does have contingency in place with redundancy built into the network. This is also the reason why the network is not completely unavailable, but rather slower than usual.
With the exponential growth in Internet usage at the NWU and the more frequent occurrences of the problem, this redundancy capacity has come under severe pressure. The capacity of the backup/redundant links was not originally designed by SANREN as an equal bandwidth redundancy (because of cost constraints that SANREN experienced). The current bandwidth on the backup link is only 1/10 of the primary link.
This problem has been escalated to SANREN and the good news is that SANREN has acknowledged the fact and is in the process of correcting this. The rectification will come in the form of an additional 10Gbps link between Bloemfontein and Potchefstroom. The expected timeframe is unfortunately between 1-2 months.

23 April 2015