Network Upgrade:IS&T is planning to finish upgrading the network in the next few months(June 15th completion), bringing the entire building up to current standards for speed and reliability. This will involve an initial walk through by teams of contractors replacing some older wiring and installing new equipment in the closets. There will be brief disruptions in service as they move the current wiring to new equipment. The initial survey will begin late in the week of the January 19th or early the week of the 26th. The survey will document all existing telephone and network locations as well as all information associated with the telephones. This survey should take about 3 weeks to complete through out the building and will start in the basement spaces and work it's way up through the building from floor to floor. This documentation will give IS&T a solid foundation with which to work off of for cabling replacements or re termination and will assist with VoIP transitions as well. After survey documentation has taken place the contractors will know which cabling needs to be replaced. These efforts will be scheduled with department and/or area contacts after IS&T has met with each to discuss concerns and service needs within them. The idea again is to start in with the basement & first floor and work their way up through the building. Starting the week of the 19th the contractors will be preparation the telephone/data closets with new wiring between them. This wiring will support the new network and telephone services being fed out these tel/data closets allowing for greater network bandwidth (speed). This work could take up to 3 weeks to complete and will consist of the contractors accessing corridors and some mechanical spaces where existing floor penetrations allow cabling to pass through. VOIP Migration:Once documentation has taken place of all the telephones, the VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) transition team will meet with department and/or area contacts to review the surveyed information. This meeting will allow any required changes to be made before transitions take place. These transitions can take place at any time (weekends or weekdays) but will need to be on a floor by floor basis through coordination with department & area contacts. This means there will be some downtime on the phones while the work in the closets is taken care of. If services are scheduled to cut over on weekends they will be operational before Monday morning. Aside from the downtime, calls and messages can not be forwarded between the new and old systems, so they will prefer to switch large blocks of people at a time, although they can work down to the level of a lab or office, if necessary. IS&T has more information regarding VOIP on their site: http://web.mit.edu/ist/topics/voip/update.html In advance of all this, they will need to know a few things: - who is the best person to contact for scheduling and information?
- are there better or worse times for work to be done?
- are there any restricted spaces?
Like we did with the power shut-offs last year, we are establishing a contact list of responsible people each lab and office to help get information to the right places without spamming the whole building, please let me know if there is anyone else you think should be on it (or if I should take someone off it). |