ITS Launching Campuswide Network Upgrade This Weekend

Information Technology Services (ITS) has initiated a project to upgrade and unify the wired and wireless networking equipment across all University of Nebraska campuses, including the University of Nebraska Omaha (UNO), into a single solution. Almost all existing network equipment and services will be replaced by June 30, 2021. This includes swapping more than 2,300 switches and 10,000 wireless access points in more than 325 buildings.

ITS will replace aging networking equipment across the NU system.

Benefits of this project include:

• Increased building network speeds from 2 Gbps to 20 Gbps

• Improved access in known low-performing wireless areas and dead spots

• Simplified guest wireless onboarding across the university for events and programs

• $6.36 million in incentives from bulk purchasing versus independent campus purchases in addition to more than $15 million in contractual savings

• Improved scalability and support efficiency by standardizing networks across the university

• Improved network and device security

To accomplish this, every networked building across campus will have a scheduled outage of up to one day. During the outage, all network access within the building will be unavailable, including access to the internet and university technology services. This will not affect the ability to work from home or other campus locations, however it will disable the ability to remotely connect into a building device.

Building migrations will begin this weekend, and will continue through the month of June. The ITS project team worked closely with leadership and technical staff in each college to identify dates that would not disrupt Spring courses. The complete migration schedule is posted on the project website.

After the work is complete, most wireless devices and university-managed devices will connect to the network again just as they did before the change; there will be a process to add a new wireless device to the network. The process to onboard guests and IoT devices (e.g., printers or Apple TVs) will change and require those devices to be reconnected to the network.

Additional information can be found on the project website. Instructions for the onboarding devices can be found at the networking support site. Questions? Contact ITS at support@nebraska.edu.