For everyone talking about this being merely a question of technical updates, it might help to see this in the bigger picture of a pattern of changes going on at MIT.
MIT had a very non-authoritarian, egalitarian culture, as Richard Stallman described it:
"I went to a school [Harvard] with a computer science department that was probably like most of them. There were some professors that were in charge of what was supposed to be done, and there were people who decided who could use what. There was a shortage of terminals for most people, but a lot of the professors had terminals of their own in their offices, which was wasteful, but typical of their attitude. When I visited the Artificial Intelligence lab at MIT I found a spirit that was refreshingly different from that. For example: there, the terminals was thought of as belonging to everyone, and professors locked them up in their offices on pain of finding their doors broken down. I was actually shown a cart with a big block of iron on it, that had been used to break down the door of one professors office, when he had the gall to lock up a terminal." (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-kth.html)
In 2004, the MIT AI Lab was "upgraded" to the new Stata Center building, an unwieldy, Frank Gehry-designed monument to a recent MIT president's ego, and the antithesis of what it replaced, Building 20. Building 20 was a utilitarian construction from WW2 with no pretenses of becoming a prized or permanent spot on campus. Instead, its residents helped it organically acquired a character of its own as Wikipedia describes well:
'Due to Building 20's origins as a temporary structure, researchers and other occupants felt free to modify their environment at will. As described by MIT professor Paul Penfield, "Its 'temporary nature' permitted its occupants to abuse it in ways that would not be tolerated in a permanent building. If you wanted to run a wire from one lab to another, you didn't ask anybody's permission — you just got out a screwdriver and poked a hole through the wall." [...] MIT professor Jerome Y. Lettvin once quipped, "You might regard it as the womb of the Institute. It is kind of messy, but by God it is procreative!" [...] Because of its various inconveniences, Building 20 was never considered to be prime space, in spite of its location in the central campus. As a result, Building 20 served as an "incubator" for all sorts of start-up or experimental research, teaching, or student groups. [...] Building 20 was the home of the Tech Model Railroad Club, where many aspects of what later became the hacker culture developed [not to mention pranksters and lock pickers, as well].'
Sadly, the TMRC's elaborate railroad, which exhibited interesting pre-miniaturization computation, didn't survive the dismantling of Building 20 and was eventually replaced with modern components. I also hear the Stata Center has two spires, one maddeningly named after Bill Gates, separating the two fiefdoms of computer science at MIT in glass-paneled offices meant to flatter status-conscious administrative types. Since Frank Gehry's architecture is proprietary and depends on strict tolerances, there's scant building modification going on.
That's why I think you can see these network changes as a tragic continuation of a destruction of the historical character of MIT, even though they may also be necessary.
More info about Building 20:
http://web.archive.org/web/20011215020413/http://rleweb.mit....
http://web.archive.org/web/20060912140051/http://www.eecs.mi...
http://tech.mit.edu/V123/N40/40stata.40n.html