ISU and UI Campus Network Infrastructures ISU and UI Campus Network Infrastructures Iowa State University and the University of Iowa have aggressively pursued research supporting campus network infrastructure for over a decade. In 1985, ISU put in place a completely new premises distribution system. That system provided copper connections from a wall plate to a building distribution center for every office, dorm room and classroom on campus. Extensive fiber optic cable has been laid in new conduits with large amounts of unfilled conduits for future expansions.
Every building has fiber optic cable connections to the campus backbone.
Ethernet quickly became the connectivity technology of choice. Initially bridges, quickly followed by routers, were used in the campus network to manage the rapidly expanding campus network. In 1990, when a major expansion of workstation computing occurred, an 100 megabits per second DAS FDDI ring was installed as the campus backbone to handle the expanding traffic. The FDDI configuration was expanded to support the servers required by the workstation clients. In 1998, ISU replaced the Lightstream 100 with a trio of Cisco Lightstream 1010 ATM switches connected by a trio of OC12 links.