The topology of the Campus network is shown in the diagram above. The fiber infrastructure consists of 24 strands of fiber to 54 locations in the Campus. Also, there are close to 100 modems which are going to server the academic community in the future. The core of the Campus communications is an Nortel ATM switch, with an outside router, and a Cisco 7000 router serving several of the buildings. Physical connections are primarily fiber optic and copper Ethernet connections with serial links to remote buildings.
Efforts are underway in the rest of the campus to minimize the various protocols in use.
We have a three-point star conforming our communications backbone, with secondary stars for different workgroups and working centers. Our communications consist of Ethernet and FastEthernet. The backbone runs on FastEthernet, with edge switches at each point serving an installed combination of switched and shared segments. We are actively pursuing an upgrade of our backbone to GigabitEthernet in order to support increased traffic due to videoconferencing and collaboration applications. We are continuously improving our physical connections.