CITES will upgrade the speed of the University network, allowing researchers and faculty to transfer large amounts of data to and from buildings at a faster rate.

Campus Information Technologies and Educational Services will replace the current network core equipment for UIUCnet, improving the connection speed for users. The new equipment will allow for up to 200 buildings to have 1-gigabit-per-second connections and six buildings to have 10-gigabit-per-second connections.

The new network core equipment, purchased from Foundry Networks, a distributor of high-performance computing components, will be in place by the time students return from spring break. Full implementation, however, will take until the end of the spring semester. Network administrators will be notified when their units are being switched to the new equipment. Work dealing with the switches will likely be done during weekends or early morning hours.

The ultimate plan is to have “a standard level of conductivity to all the buildings,” said Beth Scheid, division director of communication technologies for CITES. Scheid is helping lead the effort for a more technologically integrated campus.

The update is in many ways aimed at the researchers on campus who depend on high-speed connections to share data with each other. CITES fears that some researchers are dissuaded by not having the capacity to carry out certain operations. The new central network backbone piece is, in many ways, an attempt at predicting the future of research sharing on campus.

Charley Kline, the communications architect for CITES, who designed the blueprint for the coming switch in core equipment, acknowledged that a ten-fold increase in speed may appear drastic. The demands of future research, however, will depend on ever-growing connection speeds, said Kline, who will be attending a conference this week that will discuss connection speeds of up to 100-gigabit-per-second.

Researchers will be the first to notice the changes initiated by CITES. As of now, both the Institute for Genomic Biology, 1207 W. Gregory Dr., and the Beckman Institute, 405 N. Mathews Ave., have requested the 10-gigabit-per-second connections.

The change in speed, however, will not be noticeable on a large scale.

“The average student is not going to notice much change,” Kline said.

CITES is also thinking about research sharing on a regional and national level. They announced a plan to lease out a fiber optic ring from McLeod USA and WilTel Communications. The $4.8 million, 20-year contract is part of an effort to link the three University campuses together at speeds in excess of 10-gigabit-per-second.

The fiber optic technology will be “in production sometime in the fall,” said Mike Gardner, associate director at CITES.

This flat rate is an attempt to bypass the telephone companies who would charge exceedingly high prices for such a connection speed, Kline said.

“We just asked the phone companies if they had any extra fiber optics lying around that we could purchase,” Kline said.

The connection to the University of Illinois in Chicago will link local researchers at a national level, because Chicago is a central hub with fiber optic connections going all over the country, Kline said.