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Maryland IT official leads successful network ‘refresh’

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Sinha said UMD's network refresh would be finished in 2014.

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” [2] 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.

The network refresh also aimed to bring UMD in line with state and federal security mandates, Sinha said.

More news about mobile technology in higher education…

Purdue and Verizon partner to bring 4G to campus [3]

Year of the smart phone on college campuses? [4]

New devices allow for mobile wireless broadband [5]

The university’s new network will have firewall service for every campus department, wired network authentication, and equipment mandated in the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act [6], a 1994 federal law that allows law enforcement to more easily conduct electronic surveillance.

The massive campus-wide upgrade, which will involve more than 270 buildings, was launched in 2008, Sinha said. The $61-million undertaking will be completed by 2014.

Sinha said that while it was clear that laptops would become commonplace among college students, it was the proliferation of smart phones that led to a boom in the number of internet-accessible devices on campus.

There are now more than 40,000 smart phones, laptops, and desktop computers on the 37,000-student UMD campus.

“It was very apparent that [smart phones] would become common, once you realized the mobility war began,” said Sinha, a UMD campus technologist for 21 years, referring to commercial battles waged between cell phone companies during the nascent days of the smart phone. “It was very clear to us that this was going to happen, and that we needed to be prepared for it.”

IT officials throughout higher education have seen the number of web-ready phones skyrocket among students in recent years. About one in four students had a smart phone in February 2009, and almost half had a smart phone last summer, according to a survey [7] conducted by a Ball State University (BSU) associate professor.

Nine of every 10 students who tote an iPhone, BlackBerry, or Android around campus use the devices to access the internet, according to the BSU survey.

Smart phone presence on college campuses is expected to continue steady growth. A report released last fall [4] by market research firm International Data Corp. showed that 119 million smart phones were shipped in the first half of 2010, up from the 77 million shipped in the first six months of 2009.

UMD’s network refresh project also will bring Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology to students and faculty across the 1,250-acre university. Improving VoIP service would make teleconferencing available for faculty and staff members who need to connect to educators, researchers, and students in other states or countries, Sinha said.

“We want extremely high bandwidth for everyone here,” she said. “There’s a lot of potential in high-definition video” that isn’t usable without an advanced web network.

Sinha said the first plans for the network refresh program were laid out in the early 2000s, and the original timeline was 10 years, which was later cut in half.

“It seemed like everyone all at once in our community was connecting through mobile devices on our network,” she said. “The demands of IT used to be much more centralized. … Today, the individual consumer has a lot of power, and that’s a dramatic change that brings such power to the student.”