Academic infrastructure has never been more important as illustrated since early-March when the COVID-19 pandemic hit New Mexico and sent students packing and heading home to finish the spring semester. The ability to provide remote education with a strong technological backbone has never been more important.

As part of this year’s GO Bond C, a $3.2 million project designed to improve the learning environment and technology support at The University of New Mexico is part of an overall $13.2 million Academic and Research Infrastructure project.

The Learning Environment & Technology Support (Wi-Fi) is a mission-critical project that could provide students with modern educational technologies that are a prime concern at The University of New Mexico. Part of this project will focus on renovating and upgrading UNM’s highest priority classroom spaces that serve from 2,500 to 3,500 students each semester.

This project will also address Wi-Fi upgrades and expansion to address the need for continuous, high-speed wireless coverage across UNM’s campus. The project takes a multi-faceted approach that includes fiber optic installation in the STEM heavy academic areas to allow connections back to other areas of campus, upgrades of more than 1,500 existing wireless access points to move to the latest technologies to support more secure connections at higher bandwidths, and increased licensing to cover monitoring and management of our Wi-Fi environment.

“This project is a really important part of UNMs requests through GO Bond C and dealing with the academic and research infrastructure on UNM its main campus,” said UNM Chief Information Officer Duane Arruti. “These are really important initiatives to help, to ensure that we have the underlying infrastructure to really help support our campus community. One of the initiatives that I am incredibly excited about is our learning environment and technology support initiative. This is all about enabling the class that is physically present to be able to participate with the instructor, and also it is about enabling remote participation.”

This Wi-Fi improvement will also add robust Wi-Fi coverage to more than 20 existing learning spaces that currently have limited coverage. The core infrastructure upgrade will improve Internet services used by the entire university community on a daily basis. 

“The other component of this effort is about the Wi-Fi in those classrooms,” said Arruti. “We want our students to stay connected. Being able to connect to the high-speed internet infrastructure that we have on our campus requires an investment in our Wi-Fi technology to make sure that folks have the access that they need. I'm really excited about the projects that we have lined up and I'm optimistic that we'll be able to move them forward. I think they will provide tremendous value to our campus community.”

For more information, visit Academic and Research Infrastructure projects.

For more information on all projects, visit GO Bond C.

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