Project Overview
West Port Building — Fiber Optic Upgrade
The John Jay College campus is comprised of five interconnected buildings: Haaren Hall, North Hall, BMW, West Port, and the New Building. North Hall is currently being phased out of active use. All campus buildings are linked via a fiber optic cable backbone that supports inter-building connectivity, access to the college's on-premises data center, integration with CUNY's Central Information Services (CIS), and high-speed Internet access. The West Port building is the sole exception to this fiber optic standard. Since its integration into the campus network, West Port has relied on a wireless bridge solution, a technology that served the college adequately for over 25 years. However, a combination of structural changes to surrounding buildings, the addition of new campus construction, and increasing radio frequency interference from adjacent wireless bridge deployments has rendered this legacy solution unreliable. Network and Internet connectivity in the West Port building has become chronically unstable. Students can no longer depend on the connection to conduct essential academic activities. The degradation of service directly impedes student success and academic continuity at John Jay College. Left unaddressed, this infrastructure gap will continue to widen the disparity in access to technology between West Port occupants and the broader campus community. The John Jay College Department of Information Technology (DoIT) is requesting $150,000 to fund the underground installation of fiber optic cable connecting the West Port building to the existing campus fiber backbone. This permanent, enterprise-grade solution will eliminate the reliability deficiencies of the current wireless bridge configuration and bring West Port into full alignment with the campus network infrastructure standard.