If you were hired by the university president as an IT consultant, what would you suggest (technology, infrastructure, innovations, steps, processes, etc) in order for the internet connectivity be improved? (3000words)
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If I will be tasked to improve Internet connectivity in a university, here are some steps I would recommend regarding innovation:
First I would definitely look into their ISP (Internet Service Provider).
Nowadays, we are all aware the about the spread of using internet or known as “Net”. In an organization, in a company, in house, or even in universities and schools internet is one of the most essential part of our daily life. Through internet, you can gain lots of information. You can also earn money. But into us, students, internet is very useful regarding in doing our projects, reports, assignments, BLOGS, etc. Imagine our life without internet? Maybe this time we are still behind of some information, happenings and learning in our community. Internet is really important especially unto us IT students. We really need to gain some knowledge and information through internet.

What is internet?
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standardized Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) to serve billions of users worldwide. It is a network of networks that consists of millions of private and public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope that are linked by copper wires, fiber-optic cables, wireless connections, and other technologies. The Internet carries a vast array of information resources and services, most notably the inter-linked hypertext documents of the World Wide Web (WWW) and the infrastructure to support electronic mail. In addition it supports popular services such as online chat, file transfer and file sharing, gaming, commerce, social networking, publishing, video on demand, and teleconferencing and telecommunications. Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) applications allow person-to-person communication via voice and video.

By examining and acquiring the best package of internet connection will be the root of your solution in Internet connectivity, I would definitely recommend two different ISP for the university. With this I can easily manage public and private allocation of bandwidth, also this would limit downtime issues since I can easily route all connections from one ISP to the other in case of server issues or heavy traffic occurs. Having two different internet connections with two different ISP is definitely the best solution against downtime issues, you can also tunnel important connections to which ISP is suited or has less traffic at the moment, the university can easily filter accessibility of specific sites through managing each ISP filters. The ISP that the students will be using would have to be heavily filtered, streaming sites both video and audio should not be blocked! Instead bandwidth allocation to this sites will be limited to avoid heavy traffic, yet this measures can be bypassed by using proxy servers outside of the school but having setup the university campus with two different ISP would mean connectivity of the staff and other important connections of the school would not be affected for they will be using the other one. Budget wise, having two different ISP would be expensive upon entry and maintenance would be twice since the university would be spending 2 servers each for the ISP.

Secondly I would touch the software and hardware issues in the university. What server do they use? How do clients connect to the internet? What operating system does their client and server use? These are just some question I would ask for me to be able to maximize connectivity to the schools university. Each client especially those of the staff would be using and the students should be setup differently, limitation should be focused on system units that would be used by students and staff while units under the Library should be lightly restricted. Now on the hardware aspect, the school should set everything up to wireless networking, this would eliminate cables issues and wireless connection is easy to maintain compare to cables. But using a wireless network would add another issue on to who are allowed to use the internet. Security also plays a big role to connectivity, this is how clients connect to your network and be allowed to access the internet, now having setup your security authentication will not matter, what matter most is for the admin to know who are connecting, so I would recommend to have each users register his unit MAC address to be added in the server for it to have access of the school Wi-Fi connection. Setting up a password authentication on a wireless network is not recommended, what is important is that each connections should have its identity and this can only be done by acquiring its MAC address, this would add plenty of work load to the admin but this would also ensure the campus internet bandwidth to be secure.

Innovation
The term innovation refers to a new way of doing something. Innovation is a key factor in long-term organisational success. While there is a short-term need to generate new products and services to meet shareholder expectations, innovation is also critical to long-term survival. It may refer to incremental and emergent or radical and revolutionary changes in thinking, products, processes, or organizations. In many fields, something new must be substantially different to be innovative, not an insignificant change, e.g., in the arts, economics, business and government policy. In economics the change must increase value, customer value, or producer value. The goal of innovation is positive change, to make someone or something better. Innovation leading to increased productivity is the fundamental source of increasing wealth in an economy. Innovation is an important topic in the study of economics, business, design, technology, sociology, and engineering. Colloquially, the word "innovation" is often synonymous with the output of the process. However, economists tend to focus on the process itself, from the origination of an idea to its transformation into something useful, to its implementation; and on the system within which the process of innovation unfolds. Since innovation is also considered a major driver of the economy, especially when it leads to increasing productivity, the factors that lead to innovation are also considered to be critical to policy makers. In particular, followers of innovation economics stress using public policy to spur innovation and growth.
Those who are directly responsible for application of the innovation are often called pioneers in their field, whether they are individuals or organizations.

In the organizational context, innovation may be linked to performance and growth through improvements in efficiency, productivity, quality, competitive positioning, market share, etc. All organizations can innovate, including for example hospitals, universities, and local governments.

While innovation typically adds value, innovation may also have a negative or destructive effect as new developments clear away or change old organizational forms and practices. Organizations that do not innovate effectively may be destroyed by those that do. Hence innovation typically involves risk. A key challenge in innovation is maintaining a balance between process and product innovations where process innovations tend to involve a business model which may develop shareholder satisfaction through improved efficiencies while product innovations develop customer support however at the risk of costly R&D that can erode shareholder return. In summary, innovation can be described as the result of some amount of time and effort into researching (R) an idea, plus some larger amount of time and effort into developing (D) this idea, plus some very large amount of time and effort into commercializing (C) this idea into a market place with customers. (Reference needed)


Technology

What is technology?
Technology is a broad concept that deals with human as well as other animal species' usage and knowledge of tools and crafts, and how it affects a species' ability to control and adapt to its environment. Technology has affected society and its surroundings in a number of ways. In many societies, technology has helped develop more advanced economies (including today's global economy) and has allowed the rise of a leisure class. It can be most broadly defined as the entities, both material and immaterial, created by the application of mental and physical effort in order to achieve some value. In this usage, technology refers to tools and machines that may be used to solve real-world problems. It is a far-reaching term that may include simple tools, such as a crowbar or wooden spoon, or more complex machines, such as a space station or particle accelerator. Tools and machines need not be material; virtual technology, such as computer software and business methods, fall under this definition of technology.

In technology, I would recommend high end computer devices that performs fast and accurate. It could help browsing the internet with greater speed. When we are browsing in the internet we can see that there are many websites who are currently using special effects like animations, add-ons, flash, videos and lots of picture that requiring a bigger video card requirements. So if we try to browse using our computers in lab and in nodal, there are possibilities of buffering or sometimes if you dont have a choice, you need to restart your unit.

A high speed internet connection such as broadband will allow you to collaborate more closely with your suppliers through sharing plans, forecasts and consumer data. Sharing such information with your suppliers makes it easier for you to:
analyse real-time information about sales, orders or market trends
forecast and react quickly to changes in demand
improve efficiency - accurate information on stock means you will only order the supplies you need


Infrastructure

What is infrastructure?
According to mr. Wikipedia, Infrastructure can be defined as the basic physical and organizational structures needed for the operation of a society or enterprise, or the services and facilities necessary for an economy to function.
The development and maintenance of essential public infrastructure is an important ingredient for sustained economic growth and poverty reduction.
Poor infrastructure is perhaps the most binding constraint to growth throughout the University.

Maintenance

I think it is one of the best way in improving the connectivity of the internet. Here are some tips to improve the performance of our computers.Performing maintenance will increase the performance of the computer, and thus Beyond TV. The following three basic PC maintenance steps are highly recommended.

1.Viruses, worms, et. Al. can cause all manner of problems from system crashes to loss of data. Professional programs to protect PC's against viruses are available, such as Network Associates' McAfee package, and Symantec's Norton Antivirus software. Some anti-virus software is free. Visit your favorite download site for a sampling. Be sure to scan for and remove malware detected by the scanner of your choice.

2.Spyware / Adware is installed on your PC without your consent or knowledge through Web sites, or is installed with other software packages. These programs run in the background, often sending information about your PC or yourself over the Internet. In doing so, they slow a computer down, occupying the CPU and the Internet connection. Two very popular spyware detection and removal programs are free to personal users -- Patrick M. Kolla's SpyBot Search & Destroy and Lavasoft's Ad-Aware SE. Be sure to scan for and remove spyware detected by the scanner of your choice.


3.Hard Disk fragmentation is not an easy phenomenon to explain, but the symptom it causes is a slowing, often drastic, of operations involving data transfer to and from your computer's hard disk drive. All modern versions of the Windows operating system include a disk defragmenter. In Windows XP, for example, it may be accessed via START BUTTON --> ALL PROGRAMS --> ACCESSORIES --> SYSTEM TOOLS --> Disk Defragmenter. Be sure to run a complete hard disk defragmentation prior to running Beyond TV.

MORE TIPS:
The modem. The first tip is to get rid of the modem and move to ADSL. Yes, broadband is available at low cost in most areas. Visit keyword broadband to see if it's supported by your exchange. If you are on broadband you can probably skip the rest of our top tips because you'll be enjoying life rather than fretting about your connection speed.
Upgrade Drivers. Driver files are updated regularly by most modem manufacturers. For some modems, you can also "flash upgrade" the software in the modem to provide the latest (and fastest) communications software. Even so, you should be sure the driver is right for your operating system. To find the latest drivers, just enter the modem details into a search engine such as aolsearch.aol.co.uk/ or www.google.co.uk with the word "driver". So, to find drivers for a USR Sportster modem, enter "USR Sportster driver" and follow any instructions on how to install it. You can check your current modem drivers from Control Panel. With Windows XP, Select Start | Control Panel | Phone and Modem Options | Modems | Properties | Drivers.

Surf when the yanks are in their PJs - the internet is much faster if the rest of the world is asleep. Try surfing while eating your bowl of breakfast corn flakes. It's much more bracing!

Tweak your settings. Your PC has some settings that may improve modem throughput. All data sent over the internet goes in data packets. The size of these packets is the Maximum Transmission Unit or MTU. The aim is to send packets that are as large as possible without them needing to be broken down into smaller packets which would slow down your connection speed. A modem user, should set the (MTU) to 1500, the RWIN multiplier to 10 and Time to Live to 35. Download Tweak-Me or Tweak-XP to get this done for automatically you.

Use FTP download wherever possible. If you want to download files, you can often choose between FTP or HTML download. FTP, (File Transfer Protocol,) is much faster for file transfers so you should choose that when you can.
Use a high speed port. This'll only apply to readers with really old computers. The serial port may use an old, slow chip called a UART. The answer is to fit a high speed serial port with a 16550 UART chip or to fit an internal modem which includes one of these beasties.
Use a download tool. There's nothing more frustrating than losing a connection near the end of a one hour download. The good news is that most downloads are resumable which means they can be restarted from where the connection failed. You need the right tool to manage the reconnection - one of the best is shareware Getright. Getright also searches for the fastest download sites and splits the download between several sites with the downloads running in parallel for the maximum possible download speed.

Use a faster browser. Once you've connected to AOL, you can start any browser and run it in a second window. Opera is one of the fastest so why not download a free copy and give it a test run?
Manage your cache. Every time you use the internet, images and other files are downloaded onto your hard disk. If a particular image or other file is needed in a subsequent session, it can be pulled from the disk faster than it could be downloaded again. They are kept in a "Temporary Internet Files" folder, often called Cache. When the folder is full, Windows deletes the oldest files.

You can vary the size of this folder by visiting Control Panel and selecting Internet Options. If you increase it, then more files can be stored on hard disk but if you go too far, then a slow PC may spend too long searching cache! You'll need to experiment to find the right level for your PC and internet connection speed.
Define a blank homepage. Each time you start a browser outside your AOL window, the browser will go to the defined homepage. If this is slow, you should change the home page to a fast web site. If you are a real speed nut, set it to blank. To do this, go to Internet Options as above, and select Use Blank. Now your external browser is up and running in record time.

Don't display images. Text only windows are much faster to download. You can easily restore images when required. Here's how to set whether to display images: From Internet Options (see above) select the Advanced tab. Scroll down until you see the multimedia section, then select or deselect "Show pictures." Select Apply then OK to save your change.

References:
http://internetspeedmonitorpro.com/testing-and-improving-your-internet-speed/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Review/EDUCAUSEReviewMagazineVolume40/ImprovingInstitutionalPerforma/158023