A five- to six-year high-speed wiring project is in the works for Iowa State to make the campus network more secure, reliable and efficient.

John Kingland, director of telecommunications, said a total of 100 buildings are scheduled to be rewired with this project.

“The project will take five to six years to upgrade the buildings,” Kingland said. “We’re looking at upgrading 14 to 30 buildings a year as the budget permits.”

Kingland said no major buildings on campus will be left out, and by the time they are done more than 6,000 miles of wire will have been laid out.

“There is a great benefit of going up to the new speed,” Kingland said. “It seemed appropriate to make the jump now because of the tremendous increase in performance and reliability it will bring to the network. Today the network only supports 10 megabytes, but with the upgrade it will support a gigaspeed.”

Kingland said any down time would be kept to a minimum.

“There will be down time, but we will minimize that as much as possible,” Kingland said. “We’re going to try and put the new jacks in right alongside the old. There could be four to eight hours of down time though at any one jack, if we have to pull the old one out first.”

There are several benefits for Iowa State from the wiring project, said Dorothy Lewis, director of academic information technologies.

“One thing is, we’re always seeing growth in the use of video and other applications, and that takes more bandwidth,” Lewis said. “We’re just beginning to see other applications that may be used. [The project] puts ISU in a position to really respond to the needs of Iowa State students, faculty and staff.

Lewis said there is a lot of traffic handled on the campus servers, and Iowa State is fortunate that earlier wiring projects were done with future possibilities in mind.

“There’s always a lot of talk about Internet bandwidth, but we need to have the capacity on campus to handle the campus traffic to even get to the internet,” Lewis said. “The telecommunications staff has always been very forward-thinking, even back when the original wiring was put in back in 1985. They’re putting us in a great position to handle our needs now and in the future.”

Kingland said the current closets that house the equipment are often shared with other groups such as a janitorial staff. Disruption in services can be caused by things getting bumped or by the equipment not being in the right climate.

“We will have single-use closets in secure locations, and fewer equipment locations,” Kingland said. “This will simplify troubleshooting and the reliability of the network will improve. It’s a better environment for the equipment and that will mean fewer failures. By reducing the amount of equipment closets by one-third and using high port densities, we won’t have to replicate power in as many locations.”

Kingland said the project would be self-funded.

“Telecommunications is a self-supporting enterprise funded by user fees,” Kingland said. “So [the project] is being paid out of user fees. We’ve also sold some revenue bonds which are providing part of the funds.”

A project is also being planned to improve wireless access around campus, Kingland said.

“Wireless is only wireless for a short distance from the access points,” Kingland said. “It operates on the same frequency as cordless phones and other devices. Construction materials in the walls of buildings can also stop and slow access.

“We looking at adding strategically located access points in areas that haven’t been wired for wireless in the past.”