By LOHR McKINSTRY
ELIZABETHTOWN — Internet bandwidth at the Essex County Government Center has been so overtaxed the whole network has been crashing.
That jeopardized the operation of departments that have to file reports electronically, so the county has decided a big upgrade is in order.
County Manager Daniel Palmer said the county's computer network now uploads and downloads data at a slow 2 megabytes a second.
"We are running into bandwidth problems within the departments. Almost every department now is conducting business either directly with the state or feds or some other agency through our Internet services."
He said that changing the county's contract with Charter Cable, its Internet service provider, will give them 10-megabytes-a-second access, but the cost will go from $380 a month to $1,000 a month.
"How this works is it doesn't have too much of a budget impact, because our phone system is actually a computer system. It works on the same Internet service. What we do is allocate the cost out per (phone) extension, so in most cases it probably only impacts each department's budget by $25 or something."
The County Board of Supervisors approved the upgrade, which will be done as soon as Charter technicians can make the change.
The cost per megabyte is actually significantly less expensive with the speed upgrade than the slower service, Palmer said.
He said that as county departments added more users and moved more information, the existing system couldn't handle it anymore.
"Almost everything is being done on the Internet, and bandwidth is the big issue. A couple of times last month we actually shut down because our bandwidth maxed out."
E-mail Lohr McKinstry at: lmckinstry@pressrepublican.com
