Director of the Division of Information Technology Annie Stunden focused on efforts to upgrade campus, state and regional network services Monday during her talk, \Information Technology at UW-Madison,"" which was part of the Madison Academic Staff Association's brown-bag luncheon series.
Stunden said network upgrades are fundamental to the quality of services that the university offers to students, faculty and academic staff.
""This is core technology we need to have in place in order to do great things,"" Stunden said.
The current campus upgrade effort is a $40 million project, Stunden said, which will connect all 180 buildings on campus to a one gigabyte backbone within the next two years.
Barbara Arnold, senior admissions and placement advisor for the School of Library and Information Studies, said DoIT has already improved networking services on campus.
""Since DoIT came into existence, there's been a more coordinated effort to keep people current all over campus,"" she said.
DoIT is also connecting campuses across the state by purchasing the rights to use optic cable not currently being used by the telephone companies that put it into the ground.
""With the dot-com bust, they don't know what to do with it and they are willing to sell it off cheaply,"" Stunden said.
These cables will be used to network all of Wisconsin's four-year universities and as many two-year schools as possible.
Stunden said a third upgrade effort is to provide researchers ""outstanding networking ability to anywhere in the world."" Currently, the university is using a ""back-road feeder"" to get access to the nearest superhighway, which is located in Chicago.
Stunden said DoIT is trying to develop a Regional Optical Network that will connect all of the Midwestern states that currently do not have easy access to a world-wide high speed network.
Al Friedman, president-elect of Madison Academic Staff Association, said these brown-bag talks give the academic staff a chance to meet campus leaders in an informal setting.
""You don't typically get to just walk up and talk to people like Annie Stunden and have lunch with them,"" he said.
