Smith, Fause & McDonald, Inc.

• U. C. Santa Cruz Campus Cabling Upgrade (CCU)

SFMI has recently worked with UC Santa Cruz to master plan a campuswide cabling upgrade to introduce fiber to the desktop station wiring to 72 existing academic buildings, including academic libraries, labs, offices and IT support areas. SFMI surveyed 750,000 SF of academic space, wrote custom cost takeoff software and prepared the feasibility study that has targeted burdened construction costs at $12M A description of the project can be found here.

• UC Santa Cruz Student Communications System Infrastructure - Voice, Data and Video Distribution System to 157 buildings

Client: U.C. Santa Cruz

Project Cost: $5 million (approximately)

Year Completed

Phase IIA - Crown Merrill Apartments: SFMI started design in December 1996, construction was completed in May 1997. 

Phase IIB - Mostly East side of Campus: SFMI started design in February of 97, construction was completed in August 1997.

Phase III - Mostly West side of Campus: SFMI completed design in 1997, construction was completed in August 1998.

Project Description

As prime engineers, SFMI was in charge of design of new telephone and data wiring system to each student residence space on campus including 157 buildings located within 1,139,400 gross square feet. 

The principal intent of the Project was to migrate student telephone service form Pacific Bell to campus dial-tone. The resulting service will cost the students less and offer more features. As a consequence, however, each project needed to be sequenced to allow a "hot-cut" between the new and old systems during one of the few breaks in campus and conference calendars.

A secondary intent of the design was to replace the existing data service in the housing area which was at that time limited to wireless or telephone based modems.  The design also provided new MATV (video distribution) service at two colleges.

The project included extensive new raceway design within buildings and between buildings; and provision for equipment rooms to house cable terminations and electronics. It also included intra-building multimode and single mode networks that were placed within each college, along with new voice and MATV cabling.

In addition to designing the work for sequential, annual phased implementation, SFMI also recommended the trade bidding approach to lower construction costs. Working closely with the University's Project Managers and College Maintenance Administrators, SFMI packaged each of the large annual phases into two medium size cabling packages, supplemented by a closet construction package and an underground construction package. Trade bidding the projects in this manner substantially reduced costs and increased the number of firms that could bid.

• Film & Digital Media Communications Infrastructure, Communications Building
• Cowell Stevenson ADF3 Expansion