India, the land of ancient civilization and virtues, also known as one the most decent parts of the world, is gradually entering into the age of Internet. If you are an Indian, you can surely frown at this since Internet facilities have already become common in urban India. However, in spite of this, the consciousness of online facilities in the greater part of India is strikingly absent (owing to existent and mounting fiscal disparities) and the education system, more or less, speaks of the same saga.

But Allahabad University, known for its educational excellence, proves to be different and this has become apparent once more since the facility of Internet Connectivity on the university campus has been revamped owing to the decision of the varsity. The university has recently upgraded its existing bandwidth of 2 Mbps to 32 mbps.

It is to be noted, in this respect, that in the past only the 2 Mbps link of ERNET, India through their PoP at IIT Kanpur, was available at varsity campus. Let’s concentrate on some startling revelations as well. The first one is that the entire network spread across the four faculties of Science, Arts, Commerce and MONIRBA has 2,010 nodes out of which only 100 are working at the available computers. On the other hand, the core switch is positioned at the science faculty which is connected to other nodes by means of a network of fiber optics cable of 23 km of total length. However, due to the slow speed, most of the users at AU were finding it hard to open the desired web site.

What will be the possible benefits of renovation? Speaking on this senior faculty member at JK Institute of Applied Physics, AU, Prof RR Tiwari said (while providing details for the upgraded facility) connectivity at the varsity guest house has been made Wi-Fi after its recent renovation. Apart from this, the university has purchased 34 Mbps leased line connectivity from Reliance communications which has provided ring protected fibre to AU to increase the redundancy. The speed has immensely supported the teaching of e-Learning mode at the e-initiative building in the Science campus, added Prof.

“Now the existing 2 Mbps link of ERNET is being utilised to access the e-Journals that UGC is offering through UGC-INFLIBNET Consortia. The new 34 Mbps link is being utilised by the faculty and the research scholars and students of various departments,” said Prof Tiwari.