Management Considerations in moving from a 10Mbit LAN to a 100 Mbit LAN

Our university is preparing to introduce a 100Mbit/s campus backbone. The current position has been heavily influenced by the resource mechanism used by central government. It has led to the creation of JANET, a country-wide X25 academic network, and the adoption of the same protocol standards on our 10Mbit/s LAN. A JANET upgrade to 2Mbit/s is in hand and a 3 year local university 100Mbit/s LAN programme has started, with most sites opting for FDDI.We are installing Ethernets within departments and interfacing them to the Ring 10Mbit/s campus backbone which we have had since 1978. The installation of fibre cabling will begin in Autumn 1990 with a 100Mbit/s backbone available by 1992. The reasons for choosing FDDI over other technologies are discussed. Our first project will be an X25 JANET to FDDI gateway.By 1994 we expect most of our campus computing service to be based on a small number of large UNIX† machines networked via FDDI, with user access from X terminals via departmental Ethernets.