Ships stagger access to speed Web connectivity - Navy News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Navy Times

Ships stagger access to speed Web connectivity

Sailors on the carrier Carl Vinson have something others across the Navy would love: a reliable high-speed Internet connection during deployment.

Typically, there are so many sailors simultaneously using the carrier’s limited bandwidth that it takes a frustratingly long time to load a single Web page, if it even loads at all. But the ship has since developed Web User Groups to divide the sailors into different time slots during which they can browse the Internet. It’s akin to forcing some rush-hour commuters to go to work at noon a few times per week, taking cars off the road during peak times.

That’s the catch: Overall, there’s less congestion, but the schedule may be inconvenient.

The system is used on all East Coast carriers and all West Coast carriers, except Abraham Lincoln, according to spokesmen. Officials on Wasp-class amphibious assault ships, which can carry as many as 3,000 sailors and Marines, said they’re looking at WUGs, but there aren’t plans to implement it on their own ships.

There’s a big difference between browsing with and without WUGs, said Lt. Cmdr. Erik Reynolds, Vinson’s spokesman. Before the WUGs were created, he said, browsing the Web during free time “was like a very slow, dial-up connection. You have to try to open a page several times before you can get it open, pages regularly timed [out] mid-operation and sometimes you could not get the page open.”

It was particularly bad for junior sailors who could access the Internet only in the evenings. So many sailors were online at once that they were unable to do anything they needed to do, a news release from the ship said.

But since WUGs were implemented Dec. 12, about two weeks after Vinson deployed from San Diego, the browsing system is much better, he said.

“Pages come up the first time they are accessed, and they load in a reasonable amount of time. This gives the sailors a better experience online and allows everyone reliable Internet service,” Reynolds said.

How WUGs work

WUGs are for recreational Internet use only. Sailors who need to use the Internet to do their jobs receive additional work-only Web time — some from 8 a.m. until noon, others from noon until 11 p.m. Also, sailors always can access ship email — WUGs apply only to browsing.

There are 12 different WUGs on the ship; sailors are divided into different groups based on their rank and first letter of their last name. The more senior, the more Internet access a sailor has. For example, E-6s and below have one two-hour window per day. Chiefs to lieutenant commanders have six hours divided into three different blocks spread around the day. Commanders and above have 24-hour access.

Every day, each WUGs’ scheduled time slot is two hours later than the day before so sailors don’t always miss their Internet opportunity because they have to stand watch. Between midnight and 5 a.m., there are open hours so that anyone can use the Internet, regardless of their WUG. If they try to log on outside of their scheduled time slot, they receive an error message.

There are still times when sailors don’t have access to the Internet. Lt. Cmdr. David Oldham, the carrier’s combat systems information officer, said social media sites account for 72 percent of bandwidth usage, and access is restricted to these sites when the Internet is reserved for work and when the carrier is operating with reduced bandwidth. Sailors always are discouraged from using streaming video — it’s data-heavy — but officials don’t block videos because there’s enough bandwidth to allow them without affecting the ship’s ability to download information needed to support its missions.

The WUGs were created after John Bentrup and Samuel Zenobia from the Center for Naval Analyses spent more than a week on the carrier to research and analyze bandwidth use. Neither Bentrup nor Zenobia was available to answer questions about their work, and it’s unclear whether Vinson’s setup is based on WUGs from other carriers.

Big-deck amphibs are not using WUGs, but they may sometime in the future. Jim DeAngio, a spokesman for Naval Surface Force Atlantic, said WUGs are an “experiment.”

Spokesmen for those ships said their Internet connection can be slow at times, but they have strategies to make it run as quickly as possible. For example, on the amphib Boxer, Internet users are limited to dot-mil, dot-edu and banking websites during certain parts of the day. Other times, they have unrestricted use, said Ensign Sierra Cox, spokeswoman for Boxer.

On Bonhomme Richard, Senior Chief Mass Communication Specialist (SW) Joe Kane said there can be slow load times with 1,100 onboard, but not bad enough to require WUGs. He said he waits until few people are online to do some Web-based work, such as uploading images and videos to the ship’s Facebook page.