Wired for Speed:

The first thing Steve Willett has to do today is hook a double-wide trailer up to the University of Maryland's vast computer network. Ticket sales for the upcoming basketball season depend on it.

Willett, a network specialist with the university's Office of Information Technology, is a man in demand on the Maryland campus. He designs the in-building computer networks and brings new electronic systems online. Most of his time is spent configuring equipment from his desk inside the Patuxent Building, but today he's making his rounds in person to make sure the newest links to the network are complete.

The trailer he's connecting to the network is a temporary facility in the shadow of the new Comcast Center, wedged between a parking lot and a lacrosse field. The trailer needs network access so employees can renew season tickets for basketball fans, many of whom will soon get their first glimpse of the new arena.

Athletic department officials will be walking ticket holders through the arena to let them decide if they want to renew their tickets or not. The trailer will serve as a temporary ticket office where people can renew on site rather than walk back to the main ticket office at Cole Field House. The trailer won't be here for long, maybe only three months. Once the Comcast Center is finished, season tickets will be handled in permanent offices inside the arena. Willett will be involved there, too.

As Willett pulls up in his truck, workmen are still outside constructing the wooden steps to the trailer's front door. He walks in and flips a light switch, but the trailer doesn't have electricity yet. There's enough sunlight filtering through the windows to do the job, however.

In spite of the trailer's unfinished condition, it has been wired for the network and jacks for ethernet cables adorn each room. Underground fiber-optic cable has also been routed to the trailer, making the connection a quick operation.

This is the simplest kind of hookup Willett is called on to do. He heads for a closet in the back of the trailer's hallway. The underground cabling and the in-office wiring both converge here. It's just a matter of connecting one to the other.

Willett has already configured the ethernet switch, a small blue VCR-sized metal box inside the closet. The switch acts like a mail sorter in a post office, forwarding packets of information to their destination. The next step is to connect the trailer to the backbone of the campus's computer network, essentially a ring of high-tech equipment and fiber-optic cable that runs in a ring around campus. Directly or indirectly, all of the university's buildings are connected into this backbone loop.

The connection requires a trip to the nearby Neutral Buoyancy Research Facility, the closest building to the trailer that's also connected to the network. From here, Willett will patch the trailer through to the backbone. He opens a nondescript metal box near the base of the three-story-high neutral buoyancy tank and makes another connection with a fiber-optic wire. Time to move on.

"You get to know your way around campus pretty quickly with this job, as well as where all the communications closets are," says Willett, driving past the animal barn to the Computer and Space Sciences Building to make the final connection.

Two years ago, Willett completed a two-year project in which he visited every single closet on campus as part of an initiative to upgrade every piece of equipment in the system. There are about 500 equipment closets throughout more than 200 university buildings.

In the basement of a building on campus resides one of six nodes servicing the backbone of the network. This is one of the points where all the connections from the different buildings funnel onto the backbone. This one is an air-conditioned room with rack upon rack of equipment and multicolored wires. Willett points out a few spots of interest, like the modems where people can dial in to the university's network from outside the campus.

He fingers one yellow wire that is indistinguishable to the untrained eye from the other hundreds in the room. "This is our primary connection to the outside world," he says. If it were snipped, the campus network would be cut off from the rest of the Internet, but only for a few seconds until data was rerouted along a smaller backup line.

A few more fiber-optic wires should complete the connection to the trailer. Willett rummages around in his tool bag. "I don't have the right fiber jumpers in the bag," he says. "I'll come back for this some other day." It's time to move on to other jobs.

The other thing Willett has to do today is tour the new wing of Van Munching Hall, still under construction, which will house classrooms and state-of-the-art lab space for the Robert H. Smith School of Business. In terms of complexity, Van Munching is the polar opposite of the trailer job on North Campus.

As in the trailer, the network wiring for the building has already been installed by building contractors. Today is simply a scouting expedition to see how they've set it up before he configures the equipment.

Moving past people who are still painting, sanding and caulking, Willett checks the equipment closets. In one, his caution proves justified. "Here we have a dilemma," he says. A worker has wired a bundle of connections to a different closet than the plans called for, probably as a shortcut, but the equipment Willett had allocated here won't support this many connections. A minor adjustment to the plans should solve the problem. "It's a constant world of exceptions and special cases," he says.

In one lecture hall, each of the hundreds of seats has its own network jack for students to plug into. Jacks also line the walls of the lobby, perhaps in anticipation of food vendors or convention booths. In the computer lab, there are connections for individual computers with the same bandwidth capacity as lines that connect entire older buildings to the backbone.

If the university is wired, this newest wing of Van Munching is wired to the gills. "This building probably has more redundancy of infrastructure than any other building on campus," Willett says. The reasoning behind the building's super-wired design is that networking needs are expected to only increase in the future. Applications will multiply and people will demand more from their computers and the network that supports them. It's simply cheaper to wire for it now while the building is still being constructed.

Either way, Willett expects to be among those keeping the university ahead of a rising tide of demand for computer connectivity.   --CP