Nomad, the former primary wireless network for UT students, will retire on Feb. 3, necessitating students switch to one of four other networks: ut-open, ut-wpa2, ut-visitor or eduroam.
The unsecured ut-open is the primary alternative for students to migrate to.
The network ut-wpa2 serves as a secure network, mostly geared toward faculty and staff, enabling encrypted communication through services like Tmail, Scott Studham, chief information officer, said. It also allows faculty and staff an easier way to log in with Active Directory and the option of sharing files with other faculty and staff members with TStorage.
UT-visitor is a network for visitors to the university, and eduroam allows students studying abroad or at other participating eduroam universities to automatically get connected, Studham said.
“So if you authenticate to eduroam and then you went to Oxford University and you just took your laptop over there, there’s an eduroam at Oxford University,” he said. “We’ve signed up so that your user ID, your net ID here, would let you on their network there.”
Studham called the service very popular in Europe, but the United States only houses a handful of using universities, of which UT is the peering location.
“We’re kind of like the leader in the United States,” he said.
The retirement of Nomad was necessary because it is a “flat network,” Studham said, meaning Nomad would broadcast that a user was using the service from across campus.
“If my computer is sending out information, saying what other computers are around me and those sorts of things, it becomes too noisy, and so the performance of Nomad was becoming worse and worse as we had more people joining it,” he said.
The new network will be more focused, staying close to a computer’s access point without broadcasting usage all across campus.
The number of devices students use for Internet, including cell phones, laptops and video game systems, only augmented the problem.
“With each person bringing in between one and three devices, it’s just too many things to be on one big, flat network,” he said.
Though Studham said the new network will have “better coverage, better bandwidth and lower noise,” students should not expect an immediate change.
“We won’t see a big performance improvement on the new network until we turn off Nomad, so a lot of people are questioning, ‘Well we asked you to do this big performance improvement, and we don’t see it,’” he said. “The reason why is because Nomad is still out there, and that extra chatter that has to happen because of the way Nomad works is taking most of the bandwidth.”
Though Nomad retires on Feb. 3, currently, if users attempt to use Nomad for Internet, they are redirected to a page on the university Web site, informing them of other network options to use.
Studham said no additional work is required of students to move to a new network. The ut-open network is unsecured and requires no net ID or password login. For the networks that do require these, UT students can type in “utk,” use a slash and then put in their net ID and password for access immediately.
The student-requested project to upgrade wireless Internet quality on campus has been undergoing for about a year, Studham said.
SGA Student Services Director Jamie Lonie said the Technology Advisory Board approved the money allotted for the upgrade and that the Office of Information Technology has kept them up to date on developments during the project.
Though he said OIT has tried to inform students of the change, he worries some will still be unaware.
“They’ll figure it out, and since there’s no password required for ut-open, it will be really simple to connect to it,” Lonie said.