Calif. Pushing the envelope Given CMU's legacy, many might have expected it to employ the far-out rather than the practical. Founded in 1900 by industrialist Andrew Carnegie as Carnegie Technical Schools, the university is made up of seven colleges and numerous research institutes know for cutting-edge work in artificial intelligence, wireless computing and robotics. As patients do puzzles, magnetic resonance imaging scans of their brains are sent across the network to the college in real time and analyzed. Even the humanities are gravitating toward high tech. In a CMU fine arts course, students can create online virtual worlds in which they interact with one another.
Plans are in the works to use streaming video as a backdrop.
Great stuff, but hardly the kind of thing the Andrew Network was designed to handle a decade ago. So while most companies still were trying to get a handle on the basics of intranet technology, CMU set out to rewire the campus to accommodate it. The original Andrew Network relied on 10 Mbps architecture with fiber feeds into each of the school's academic and administrative buildings. Network 2000 upgrades the links to Fast Ethernet operating at 100 Mbps. At the same time, CMU installed Fast Ethernet switches in each building.