IT began preparations for the latest upgrade to the university’s network, RiceNet3, in 2014. Twenty years before, a segmented and restricted network was first rolled out to the entire campus.
“In 1994, the campus network was expanded to all buildings on campus,” remembers Tony Gorry, who was Rice University’s Vice President for Information Technology at the time. “When I got here, the first thing that struck me about Rice was the uneven deployment of computing. In CS and Engineering, Owlnet was doing well, but if you walked around the campus, you saw really very little penetration of computing into any other areas. So one of the first things I did was to seek to reallocate money to make Owlnet a university-wide network. Science and Engineering faculty were understandably concerned that the shift might diminish support for networking in their areas. But they acknowledged the need for a broader development on the campus. We were thus able to fund labs in the colleges and extend the network to the colleges, where it had not gone before. We also wired all the college rooms. By encompassing all the departments and colleges in a campus-wide network, we took an important step in integrating information technology in education and research at Rice.”