News

Telecommunications

For years, most people have only worried about download speed: how fast you can pull data from the internet for streaming, browsing, and software updates. Today, what you send up to the network can be just as important.

Many everyday tasks are now upload-heavy, even if they don’t look that way at first glance.

• Video meetings: Platforms like Zoom, WebEx and Teams continuously send your audio and video to everyone else, so poor upload causes choppy video and “robot voice” even when download looks fine.
• Cloud storage and backups: Photos, documents, research data, and server backups stream into cloud services all day in the background.
• Collaboration tools: Shared drives, version control, and SaaS apps constantly sync changes from your device back to the cloud.
• Security cameras and IoT: Campus and home cameras, sensors, and smart devices send steady video and telemetry upstream for monitoring and analytics.

When upload is constrained, these services don’t just slow down—they can stall, glitch, or silently fall behind, which users often mistake for “the internet is slow.”

Across the industry, upstream usage is growing faster than it used to and has become a major driver of total traffic. As more people work, learn, and collaborate online, they generate far more outbound video, files, and telemetry than traditional “download‑only” applications ever did. For providers, this means that old assumptions—where upstream was treated as an afterthought—no longer match real usage.

For connected sites, higher and more reliable upload capacity translates directly into better outcomes.

• Teaching and remote learning: Faculty and students presenting, screen‑sharing, or streaming labs need consistent upstream to avoid disruptions.
• Research and operations: Large datasets, logs, and backups moving to regional or cloud resources depend on capacity and low contention in the upstream path.
• Security and facilities: Video surveillance and sensor networks are only as useful as the network’s ability to carry those streams to storage and monitoring systems.

When multiple people or systems share a limited upload pipe, everyone’s experience can degrade at once—even if download seems plentiful.

Over the past year, we completed a major upgrade of our high-speed Transit Ring, migrating from older lower speed circuits to a new design built around higher-capacity links and modern routing platforms. This project greatly multiplied the total bandwidth available across our backbone, giving campuses and agencies much more headroom for upload-heavy applications like video, cloud backup, and research data transfers.

Just as important as raw capacity, the new ring adds more diverse and redundant paths between our core locations. By working with multiple carriers and carefully engineering physically separate routes, we greatly reduced the chance that a single fiber cut or regional issue will interrupt service. If an outage occurs on one path, traffic can automatically shift to another, often without users noticing anything more than a brief blip.

Behind the scenes, this migration also simplified operations and gave us better visibility into how traffic flows around the state. With fewer, faster circuits and updated hardware, we can monitor performance more closely, react to problems more quickly, and plan future growth more accurately. For our customers, the result is a network that is not only faster, but also more resilient and better aligned with how you work today—especially when it comes to upload‑intensive services.

The WVNET Telecommunications Group is also in the process of configuring and planning the deployment of a new VPN server and replacement backbone routers for both the north and south of the state. Through these strategic upgrades, WVNET is positioning its customers to take advantage of the speed, reliability, and scalability necessary to support innovation and meet evolving demands