In spring 2018, OIT embarked on a multi-year project to completely refresh the University's wired and wireless networks. The project was successfully completed in December 2021.
Goals and benefits
This upgrade project made OHIO's network capable of supporting an infrastructure that can be updated on a regular basis and brought the University's wired infrastructure up to speed, both literally and figuratively.
The upgrade featured a number of benefits, including:
- Increased speed for wired connections and Wi-Fi
- An increase in the reliability of Wi-Fi coverage
In previous years, OIT had undertaken a massive upgrade effort over a brief period. This initiative included the creation of a continuous improvement plan for our network.
Drivers
Modernization
Prior to this project, OHIO's last comprehensive wired network upgrade happened a decade ago. Much of that equipment remained in service and was replaced throughout this project.
Demand
Network demand continues to increase each year. Faculty, staff, and students expected our network to facilitate their teaching, learning, research, and on-campus living needs. We could not continue to meet those expectations with the existing equipment, which was reaching the end of its useful life.
Preparing for a wireless future
Our network infrastructure needed to support the future expansion of wireless network coverage while providing acceptable performance for individuals who still need access to a wired connection. OHIO's wireless network was already significantly faster than the wired network, and that advantage increased as part of this upgrade. Wireless devices can be moved around at will: there is no need to have a wired port activated in a new location.
Notable achievements
| December 2021 | Network Upgrade Project reaches completion |
| May 2021 | Data center firewall replacement successful |
| December 2020 | Wired network upgrades completed ahead of schedule |
| July 2020 | RFPs awarded for core routing environment and firewall upgrades |
| February 2020 | Patch panel work completed ahead of schedule |
| Activity | Status | Timeline | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Upgrades to core network equipment
|
Completed | Apr 2019 - Oct 2021 |
We replaced old equipment, reconfigured existing gear, and installed new items across all campuses and at our network's core. |
|
IP address updates
|
Completed | Jan 2019 - Aug 2021 | OIT technicians visited buildings to make initial configuration changes to devices. Roughly 2-4 weeks after the on-site work was completed, a brief network disruption occurred to finalize the configuration changes. |
|
Wireless improvements
|
Completed | Jun 2018 - Jun 2020 | Replaced and installed approximately 3,800 wireless access points across our campuses. |
|
Cabling & patch panels
|
Completed | Feb 2019 - Jan 2020 | Raised the standard of each building's cabling and infrastructure to support future higher speeds. Work involved reclaiming and repurposing existing equipment, running new cable, and installing fiber optic feeds. |
|
Fiber optic cable work
|
Completed | Dec 2018 - Mar 2019 | Added fiber optic capacity to the links between some buildings and our network core. |
|
Wired jack preparation & consolidation
|
Completed | Apr 2018 - Sep 2018 | OIT crews visited every room in every academic and administrative building on the Athens campus to verify locations of each jack, reconfigure connections as needed, and consolidated those connections to reclaim underutilized network infrastructure. |
Our commitment to you
This network upgrade was a massive project spanning multiple years with occasional service disruptions. We made the following commitment to you, the faculty, staff, and students of Ohio University:
- We will respect your work. Whenever possible, we will schedule disruptive changes during times of low demand, and we will keep the University's academic and administrative calendars in mind as we plan our work.
- We will minimize the impact. Changes that may require an outage will receive close scrutiny. Given a choice between more effort for us or less impact for you, we will choose the former.
- We will communicate. You will always know in advance what we plan to do and when we plan to do it. Communication methods will include OHIO News and OHIO Employee News stories, targeted email messages, physical signs in buildings where upgrade crews are working, and descriptive notes technicians can leave behind if they make any changes to a space while its occupants are away.