Network and Telecommunications Services

Technical Network Information

Here you will find information on how your computer is connected to the Hamilton College Network and the Internet.

There are over 6,000 network ports on-campus.  All buildings on campus have network jacks present in the residence hall rooms, classrooms and offices. The network jacks are usually mounted on the wall along with telephone jacks. A network jack is usually marked with a computer icon above it to indicate a data network jack.

The network wall jacks in residence halls, classrooms and offices are connected to Category 5e (Cat 5e) ethernet cables running from the wall jacks to the basement of the building where a network closet is situated.  In the network closet, these cables connect to network switches. Network switches are devices that connect all the computers in the building to the campus network. The campus has over 170 network switches installed in over 60 buildings.  A typical switch closet can be seen below:

All of the building switches are connected by underground fiber optic cables to core switches in CJ or McEwen. The building switches each have an uplink connection speed of upto 1 Gbps (Gigabits per second) over the undeground fiber optic cabling to the core switch. The core switches are located in CJ and McEwen. Picture below shows one of this core switches which is a 6509 series switch.

The core switch is where all the fiber optic cables coming from the buildings are connected. The core switch is connected to the various Hamilton servers located in the basement of Burke Library. These servers include e-mail, web server, blackboard, SSS, etc. which are the part of Hamilton network. Hence whenever you access local network resources like e-mail, SSS, Hamilton college web pages, etc, the network traffic goes through the core switch from your building switch and connects to these servers. Click here for more information on Hamilton servers.

The core switch also connects to the Internet through the internet router located in the basement of the Burke Library. This router is connected to Internet through a high speed connection (50 Mbs primary connection) provided by Internet Service Provider (ISP) which is Time Warner Cable. Click here for more Internet information at Hamilton College.

You can E-mail the Network Services Team at: ns@hamilton.edu

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