The hill and canal bordering MTU’s campus has led to a compact, urban-like plan that presents both benefits and challenges for the telecommunications system. There are about 20 main buildings with a few small buildings that require telecommunication's service. The entire campus system has an extensive conduit system for outside cabling, which allows the outside fiber plant to be upgraded quickly and inexpensively. Both singlemode and multimode fiber are available between all buildings in ample quantities to support a multitude of services.
The campus has very limited amounts of inter-building copper (telephone) wiring. All campus buildings (many of which are modern, high-rise structures) are wired for telephone and data services. Approximately 60% of the campus’s 26,000 communications jacks are wired with category 5 or 6 copper cabling, the remainder is wired with category 3 cabling. A very limited amount of fiber has been installed to a couple of server rooms to support gigabit Ethernet connectivity for compute and file servers. Virtually all of the campus buildings have an extensive riser cabling system. All buildings have category 5 copper riser cabling for data and category 3 copper riser cabling for telephone. A few buildings have fiber riser cabling, as well. Ventilation and conditioned, back up power improvements are being made in closet facilities all across campus.
Approximately 10% of the physical area on campus is covered by the University’s general access wireless LAN network. Campus proper has excellent cell phone coverage outside, but the high-rise buildings have many inside areas with poor coverage. The University also deploys several radio systems to aid security, facilities, and computer systems staff with their work. |
