The University of Notre Dame Athletics has standardized its campus network by replacing 955 switches with Cisco Catalyst 9300X hardware to address technical debt and improve visibility. The project, which utilizes Cisco ThousandEyes, aims to support increasing bandwidth demands and prepare the infrastructure for future AI-driven operations.
This infrastructure modernization demonstrates that supporting high-bitrate video and AI-driven operations requires eliminating fragmented legacy hardware. By consolidating nearly 1,000 switches into a single hardware family, the university provides a blueprint for streaming-heavy environments to reduce latency and configuration drift. For the broader ecosystem, this shift highlights that wireless performance is now entirely dependent on back-end power and multigigabit wired headroom. As organizations move toward AIOps, the focus must shift from simple device health to the experience-level telemetry provided by tools like ThousandEyes. Watch for whether other large-scale venues adopt this 'all-at-once' refresh model to bypass the inefficiencies of traditional rolling upgrade cycles.
Effective network management is increasingly critical as live streaming requirements continue to prioritize robust hardware encoding and adaptive hosting to maintain quality. This approach mirrors recent efforts where network infrastructure across arenas was standardized to support similar high-density demands, a trend further accelerated by HPE Networking growth as enterprises scale their back-end capacity. To avoid technical debt in these environments, organizations are increasingly prioritizing standardized, scalable hardware over bespoke integrations, a shift also seen in multi-vendor Wi-Fi deployments.
The University of Notre Dame has completed a massive network refresh, replacing 955 legacy switches with Cisco Catalyst 9300X hardware across 170 buildings. This overhaul addresses technical debt caused by doubled bandwidth usage since 2021, ensuring the campus infrastructure can support high-bitrate video streaming and future high-performance wireless demands through 2030.
The university replaced 955 legacy switches to address technical debt and accommodate a doubling of campus bandwidth usage between 2021 and 2026, which was primarily driven by increased video consumption.
The university standardized its campus infrastructure by deploying Cisco Catalyst 9300X switches across 170 buildings.
The infrastructure is designed to support future 100-gigabit connections for high-demand end users by 2030 and utilizes Cisco ThousandEyes for experience-level telemetry.
By consolidating to a single hardware family, the university reduced 28 different switch models and 100 operating system versions down to three golden images managed via Cisco Catalyst Center.
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