Notre Dame Overhauls Campus Network With Cisco to Cut Technical Debt and Prepare for AI

The University of Notre Dame has completed a major infrastructure overhaul across its campus in partnership with Cisco Systems Inc., replacing 955 legacy switches across approximately 170 buildings to clear accumulated technical debt and prepare for artificial intelligence workloads, according to a report from SiliconANGLE .

The modernization initiative, which ran alongside an announced multiyear partnership between Cisco and Notre Dame Athletics, was carried out over five months without taking campus operations offline. The deployment began during spring break in March, and by Aug. 1, all but a handful of single-switch locations were finished. Notre Dame standardized its wired network on Cisco Catalyst 9300X multigigabit switches managed through Cisco Catalyst Center using zero-touch provisioning, supplemented by Cisco Professional Services and Cisco ThousandEyes for network visibility.

Prior to the refresh, Notre Dame operated a fragmented environment where switches ranged in age from two years to more than 15 years old, encompassing roughly 28 distinct models and more than 100 operating system versions. John Buysse, senior director of network and telephony services at Notre Dame, explained that a previous strategy of incremental annual upgrades created configuration drift, high maintenance overhead, and inconsistent network performance for users moving between buildings. The university chose to replace the environment in a single consolidated initiative to standardize service and free staff time during subsequent years.

Campus bandwidth usage more than doubled between fiscal year 2021 and fiscal year 2026, driven largely by video traffic. The upgraded infrastructure is architected for a 10-year lifecycle, with plans to support 100-gigabit connections to specific end users where required by 2030. Chief Information Officer Tracy Weber noted that student expectations demand continuous connectivity across both personal devices and connected residence infrastructure, such as laundry monitoring systems.

The upgrade was also driven by back-end demands from campus Wi-Fi upgrades to 6-gigahertz bands and power limitations on legacy equipment. Older switches could not be fully populated without exceeding their Power over Ethernet budgets when powering access points, IP phones, and security cameras.

On the security and operational front, reducing the environment to three standardized golden images within Catalyst Center allows continuous compliance auditing and accelerates vulnerability patching across campus. The university also plans to use telemetry from Cisco ThousandEyes to transition toward automated AI network operations to identify and resolve service issues proactively. Initial cutover disruptions caused a temporary rise in trouble tickets, but ticket volume subsided once the academic semester began.