The campus network as we know it today is relatively young. The installation of the cable to link every student and faculty building together was put in during the summer of 1998. The next phase was to come in 1999 when the 6,200 Ethernet ports were finally activated, allowing users to connect to the campus network and the Internet. However, these first steps were not without problems. That same year in the summer of 1999, all the ports in almost every building on campus had to be replaced due a manufacturer defect. The exceptions being Bolling, Pocahontas, and Ingles Halls. These residence halls all had ports which functioned properly.

During this past summer, if you happened to be here taking classes or living off campus, you may have noticed how much faster your connection was. The answer to this is simple, the less people connected to the network the more bandwidth there is available; however this was not the only reason for accelerated connections.

In May of this year a faster router, the Marconi ESX-4800, was added to control the traffic going to and from the network. In general terms, computers communicate by sending and receiving packets of data. This new addition allows a higher volume of packet transfer, increasing it from 70,000 to ten million bytes per second! This one piece of hardware alone cost $141,500, but compared to the entire cost of that Radford University pays to provide a network for students, it is only a fraction of a much larger figure.

There have also been upgrades to the machines that control the modem pool off-campus students dial into to connect to the network. The CISCO-AS5300 was purchased and works much more efficiently than the previous four CISCO-AS5200's put together. The 5200's had a rate of 33.6kb per second and allowed 192 modem users on at a time; the 5300 also allow 192 users online but ran at rate of 56kb per second.