The COVID-19 pandemic has forced us to creatively rethink research collaboration, knowledge sharing, and the university classroom. With Zoom, new opportunities for value creation have emerged, but also new challenges.
Elsewhere, I have written about a few cost-effective ways to enhance sound and video quality on Zoom. In this post, I am going to focus on another important building block to the online university: your at-home Internet.
Before begin, I would like to thank Schulich’s IT Director Mark Orlan, for his generous support, guidance, and fellow-geekiness, and for keeping all Schulich faculty, staff, and students safe and connected.
Going into the COVID-19 pandemic, most residential Internet setups (my own included), were probably not equipped to handle the fusion of work and play that is now characteristic of "the new normal”. This may also and especially be the case for colleagues who use their Internet not only for research, teaching, and admin, but also for typical “at home” stuff such as media streaming and, during the pandemic, bandwidth-intensive home schooling sessions.
To address this issue, I will discuss two distinct but intersecting technological domains: residential Internet plans and residential network technology.
Your Internet Plan
Zoom and remote handling of data requires a brief discussion of Internet download and upload speeds. These speeds, which are typically measured in megabits per second (or Mbit/s for short) determine how fast and reliable a given connection might be. In the case of Zoom, where your own video and sound needs to be shared with your audience, upload speeds matter greatly. Zoom recommends a minimum upload speed of 1 Mbit/s. However, in reality and based on personal experience, a smooth Zoom session might require at least 10 Mbit/s.
Like most profs, at the outset of the pandemic, I had a standard high-speed cable Internet package, in my case with a Canadian Internet provider called Rogers. For a monthly fee of CAD 120, I was promised to receive 100 Mbit/s down and 20 Mbt up connection. Due to a technical problem with the cable grid in my neighborhood, I only received a day-to-day performance of 40 Mbit/s down and 3-5 Mbit/s up.
This connection impasse proved to be a considerable bottleneck during my first all-online semester (summer 2020), leading to frequent connection drops and a subpar experience for our tuition-paying students as well as my research collaborators.
Gladly, I discovered that Rogers-competitor Bell offered a much faster connection via fiberglass-enabled gigabit Internet for almost the same price of CAD 130. Bell recently built up a fiberglass network infrastructure in the Greater Toronto Area, and in my case this led to a significantly improved speed of 1.5 Gbit/s down and 1.5 Gbit/s up. If you live in Toronto, you may want to check whether fiberglass Internet is available on your street at Bell.ca. My personal experience has been that the transition is smooth, and the change costs are minimal.
Your Home Network
Second, a university home office poses a number of additional technological and security challenges beyond your Internet plan.
Because university faculty and staff handle highly sensitive data, most institutions including my own provide important services such as virtual private network connections (VPN) via Pulse and state-of-the art two-factor authentication via Duo. Despite these services, the user end point still remains fundamentally less secure at home than on campus.
One important reason for this challenge is that most residential modems are consumer-facing all-in-one devices that combine a modem, router, firewall, and wifi access point, often at the expense of doing any of those tasks well. In addition, most residential modems do not offer threat management solutions.
This is particularly problematic when considering that typical residential modems serve not only computers but also phones, tablets, game consoles, printers, and Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. This multi-device use case opens several backdoors or “ports" to the outside world, which make such a network fundamentally unsuitable for the handling of sensitive university data.
For this reason, university-focused residential home Internet requires additional security measures akin to what your university’s IT team will have already installed on your campus long ago. After doing some research, I found several, relatively cost-effective solutions in the lower-end enterprise or “prosumer” market for routers that provide at least some of these measures.
In my current setup, I have replaced Bell’s standard all-in-one HH3000 modem (which, like most standard modems, has attracted plenty of criticism from users) with a Ubiquiti UniFi Dream Machine Pro (UDMP, CAD 500). The smaller version, the UniFi Dream Machine, has a built-in wifi access point, and costs CAD 400.
Michael Kummer has written a comprehensive review of the UDMP which you can find here.
In combination with my university’s existing security measures (e.g., Pulse and Duo), the UDMP can reliably handle gigabit Internet speeds while also ensuring that external security threats are continuously managed (and prevented). Most importantly, the UDMP allows me to compartmentalize different uses (university-related networking, IoT/smart home devices, streaming devices, etc.) by creating fully independent virtual networks at home.
Conclusion
In conclusion, slow and unsafe home Internet during and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic can significantly undermine your research, teaching, and admin productivity. It can burden your family, research collaborators, students, colleagues, and many others. As well, data breaches can be extremely costly for universities.
In the present case example, a one-time investment of approx. CAD 400-500 for a more secure and flexible residential modem and security gateway and a monthly increase of CAD 10 to an individual user's Internet plan have led to significant speed and security benefits.
++Update++
Yes, I know. The UDMP’s WAN SFP+ doesn’t sync at 2.5. As I write above, it’s a “prosumer” solution. To make this setup generate >1GB/s speeds, the GPON SFP+ module will need an SFP module that can handle 2.5 GB/s autonegotiation. Otherwise you will only approximate 1GB/s. Alternatively, you can use load-balancing or wait for the UDMP firmware update. I hope this helps.
++Upate 2++
Two switches that work well with the UDMP and sync at 2.5G are the XG-6-POE or XG-16. However, there is another issue with UDMP PPPoE (unrelated to the SPF question) which limits max speeds to about 800. This too requires a firmware fix, which is currently pending.
