An upgrade Thursday, March 14, of the fiber optic link from campus to Cogeco brings the University’s external network capacity to 10 gigabytes per second.

“That makes 10 billion bits serving up our bytes,” says Todd Sands, executive director of the Centre for Smart Community Innovation. “That’s more capacity to meet our ever-growing external network needs.”

The centre’s WEDnet Regional Advanced Network, together with more than 50 community partners, helped make possible the change supporting regional telecommunications.

Dr. Sands says the upgrade took more than five months of careful planning. He praised strong collaboration with private sector network providers as the most cost-effective way to establish the high capacity necessary to keep pace.

With over 220 fiber-connected end-points utilizing WEDnet, the wired, wireless, and fibre-based campus building connections all end up traversing WEDnet, whether they are destined for somewhere on the Internet, one of the 150 local schools including St. Clair College, or one of the research networks such as ORION.

Sean Moriarty, assistant director of IT Services, says the expansion benefits all campus users and will serve the University’s downtown campus buildings when they come online.