When the first University of Maryland (UMD) students came to campus with web-accessible phones, Tripti Sinha knew it wasn’t a fad. The university network needed an upgrade, and quickly.
So Sinha, the research university’s director of networking and telecommunications services, along with a team of the campus’s IT experts, set out on a five-year “network refresh” that would do more than just let students and faculty use the internet on their smart phones.
Two statistics jumped out to IT decision makers like Sinha when the project was in its planning stages: 70 percent of the university network’s equipment was considered obsolete, and 80 percent of campus buildings lacked the wiring to support up-to-date network speeds.…Read More