Upgrading the 20-year-old computer network in the Main Library has started, in hopes of bringing it up to current standards and providing room to grow for future technologies.

The $755,665 upgrade replaces the entire network infrastructure of the building. The current conduit and cable trays do not support new CAT-5 or CAT-6 cables. This new infrastructure will allow easier upgrades in the future, needing only to pull out the old cables to run new ones. The project was scheduled to start in January and completed in July, but now scheduled to be finished by September.

Lee Galaway, research programmer for the library, said delays can be attributed to the size of the project.

“It’s the scope of the project,” Galaway said. “When you go to a bidding process you have to go to a much more in depth process.”

Construction is currently taking place on the first floor and parts of the basement. The crew first drills holes into the concrete floors to run new conduit. Most of the construction goes on before the building opens, from 7 a.m. until about 8:30 a.m.

“We are confident that once finals are over and (the workers) can start making some noise, we will really see some action around the building,” said Tim Zimmer, library project manager.

Mike Smeltzer, director of network communications for Campus Information Technologies and Educational Services, said students should notice a significant difference in the amount of throughput from the network.

“If they are checking their email, will they notice a difference? No,” Smeltzer said. “But if they are sending an attachment, yes.”

He said that download speeds will be significantly higher as well.

“(Another goal is) that every square inch of the library will have wireless connection,” Smeltzer said.

However, this does not include the stacks, due to the amount of interference the books would cause.

The library upgrade is part of the larger CITES upgrade to the entire University, bringing the network up to current standards, according to the CITES Web site. This will upgrade the backbone of the network to a 10 gigabit per second (Gbps) speed, 1 Gbps to each building and Communication Equipment Room, and replace old Cat-3 cabling with new Cat-6 for 100 megabit per second (Mbps) connections to desktop computers.

“It’ll be awesome,” Zimmer said. “I have a cable modem at home … and we ran about 3.4 megabits per second.”

Projects at David Kinley Hall, Davenport Hall and Turner Hall have already been completed. Smeltzer said some people do not even realize that they have full wireless access to all classrooms and common meeting areas.

Charlie Smyth, manager of system services for the department of crop sciences, said recovery and reliability at Turner Hall, the biggest project of the upgrade, is much better with the new hardware.

“In terms of the actual network itself, it’s very stable, very fast,” Smyth said. “It (used to) take 8 hrs to image that lab … It now takes 25 minutes.”