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Apple update bogs down college campus networks


Any question about the ubiquity of Apple products on college campuses was surely answered last week.

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Colleges also see traffic spikes during March Madness.

The update to Apple’s new operating system became available, and students downloading iOS7 brought campus networks to a crawl, with some students taking to social media to complain about the bogged-down networks.

Campus IT departments, which already struggle to ramp up internet bandwidth to satisfy students’ growing demand for bandwidth-hogging video, went as far as to block the downloading of Apple’s much-anticipated iOS7.

The influx of iOS7 downloads brought some campus networks — including the one at Abilene Christian University (ACU) — to something comparable to dial-up internet speeds.

The Apple update isn’t the first time campus technology officials have had to deal with a spike in bandwidth use. Many campuses have struggled to meet bandwidth demand during the NCAA Tournament in March, when thousands of students stream games involving their school’s basketball team.

The Apple iOS7 was released Sept. 17. There are more than 60 million Apple devices that use the company’s operating system, with the majority of those in North America.

Ohio University’s IT communications director asked in a school-wide eMail for students to hold off on downloading Apple’s iOS7 update until after the campus’s network issues were resolved.

University of Colorado Colorado Springs (UCCS) told its students in an eMail sent just hours after the iOS7 update became available that the school would block access to Apple’s servers to maintain some semblance of internet access.

See Page 2 for more on ‘event-driven network spikes’…

UCCS officials said bandwidth demand doubled shortly after the Apple operating system release, according to a campus report.

“We are seeing most of our available internet connection being used to install the new operating system (iOS 7) for iPhones and iPads,” the university’s IT department wrote in a campus-wide eMail addressing bandwidth and network concerns.

Several students from New York University (NYU) said they couldn’t access the university’s web site after iOS7 became available for download.

Kurt Marko, an IT engineer and technologist, wrote in a blog post that the havoc wreaked by the Apple iOS7 update should help IT officials everywhere — not just college campuses — better understand the challenges of what he termed “event-driven network spikes.”

“While it’s easy to point the finger at Apple or its impatient and ignorant… users, this type of event should be a wake-up call for network managers,” he wrote. “It’s a predictable consequence of the rapid, inexorable shift of software and content distribution from physical media or broadcast signals to the cloud. Whether it’s… streaming the news during a major incident like the Boston Marathon bombing, or checking out a live feed from the Olympics, the age of event-driven network spikes is upon us.

Apple’s servers have been bombarded with a deluge of users looking to update to the latest operating system, with many finding the activation service unavailable or otherwise unresponsive.

Even Apple noticed the massive influx of iOS7 downloads and warned employees in a “high priority” message that the company’s servers were being “bombarded with a deluge of users looking to update to the latest operating system, with many finding the activation service unavailable or otherwise unresponsive,” according to Apple Insider, a blog covering the tech giant.

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