All this wiring is routed back within a departmental or college building to one or more hub locations where data networking equipment has the task of regenerating and distributing packets of data to outlets throughout the department or college. At present the 3Com Ethernet UTP hub is the most common device employed for this function. This covers PCs, Apple Macs and Unix machines as well as the major host systems. However, many of the products on offer are in early stages of development and the University is unlikely to introduce ATM as part of the general operational network for a while yet. At the time of writing, the University Data Network is in the process of upgrading to a new gigabit backbone, with departmental and college networks connecting at 100Mbit, a tenfold improvement over the existing FDDI ring.
Further information is provided here .