Champaign City Council members will vote on a resolution that would direct city staff to implement a fiber optic communications network for city facilities at its regular meeting Tuesday. 

If passed, the city will purchase Extreme Network branded equipment, bought through Sound Incorporated, which will cost the city up to about $472,000. It will replace the current copper network, which is functional but expensive, slow and unreliable, according to a city memo.

The fiber optic system will make the computer network’s speed in each city building anywhere from 10 to 6800 times faster, depending on the facility, according to last week’s presentation to the council by Mark Toalson, information technologies director for Champaign.

“Simply put, fiber is faster,” Toalson said at last week’s meeting. “What’s going to be in the ground … will move data from point A to point B much faster.”

Karen Foster, city council member at-large, said she is excited for the new changes and thinks the new system will be an improvement for the city.

“I am most excited that all of our buildings will have the capability of being hooked up to the UC2B fiber,” Foster said. “It will be great.”

If implemented, the city will be able to use the fiber optic network to create a disaster recovery and backup system, consolidate all servers in one central location, implement an internal wireless network at all city facilities and allow intricate applications to run at a faster speed.

Other local users of Extreme Network equipment include the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and Wolfram Research. 

Emma can be reached at [email protected].