Dear faculty, students, and staff,
I am pleased to announce that Education City’s Internet connection has been upgraded from 1Gbps to 5Gbps (gigabits per second) in stages over the past few months. The first two stages of upgrade took place on 12 February and 11 March. The final stage of the work was completed for CMU-Q on Saturday (26 March) when our building’s connection was upgraded, thus completing the upgrade to the entire path.
The diagram below shows the Internet connectivity for Education City. All red boxes represent locations where networking equipment was upgraded. The red colored speeds (5Gbps and 10Gbps) are links that have been upgraded with the new speeds indicated. When we look across the entire path, we see that the slowest portion is now 5Gbps and thus the governing speed for our Internet connection.
On a related matter, the connection from our homes to Education City was misconfigured and needlessly routing all traffic through New York. This routing issue has been rectified today and you should see much faster connection speeds and lower latency when connecting from home. So, access to common resources like Blackboard, the Network Drives, and our public website should be faster.
This upgrade has been in the works for more than a year. All branch campuses have worked closely with Qatar Foundation’s IT department, Meeza (QF’s IT services provider), Ooredoo, and GCX (our Internet provider) to make this complex set of changes to the network. We are very pleased to deliver this upgrade to you and the rest of our Education City community.
—
Khalid Sarwar Warraich | Chief Information Officer