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Boosting BandwidthAlma College partners with Merit to offer its students and staff unparalleled Internet accessOctober 2006
In spring 2002, Phil Warsop faced a situation every IT administrator dreads: The three telco-leased T1 (1.5 Mbps)
connections serving the campus network at Alma College were at capacity. There just wasn't enough bandwidth to meet
the growing demands of a higher learning institution. Upgrading the circuits neither made sense nor was economically
feasible. While the college explored solutions, 1,400 students and 120 faculty members experienced incredibly slow connections,
essentially bringing the entire campus to a cyber standstill.
"We considered our options and decided to do a complete overhaul of the campus network infrastructure," Warsop, the assistant IT
administrator at Alma, explained. Within 24 hours, Alma replaced every router on campus with HP switches and installed separate
VLANs (a VLAN or Virtual LAN, is a network of computers that behave as if they are on the same physical wire, although they may
actually be physically located on different segments of the LAN) to every building. By routing network traffic directly through
the campus public VLAN, Alma's users were able to connect directly to the Merit backbone - almost.
"We had to find a way to connect that last three-quarters of a mile between campus and Merit's network. We did it by running a
piece of fiber between the college and the MMnet GTECH technology center in downtown Alma," he said. "It was a great deal for
both Alma College and MMnet, because MMnet had wanted to connect to Merit's fiber as well.
Two weeks later the upgrade was completed and Alma College had 100 Mbps of connectivity to the desktop across campus with
gigabit fiber between all buildings, as well as vertically within buildings. The change proved to be much more affordable
than leased T1s because the new connection allowed for the option of going from 12 to 100 Mbps of access without incurring additional circuit costs.
"We ended up paying less for our direct connection to Merit than we were paying for the leased lines," Warsop added.
Enormous benefits for students and faculty"Not only is every desktop, office, lab and classroom on campus connected to Merit, Merit also provides our campus with advanced
network connectivity to the Internet2 backbone network, essentially connecting every desktop to Internet2," Warsop added.
Through Merit, the high-bandwidth connectivity to the desktop has also provided Alma users with unparalleled access to education and
resource collaborations across the country and around the world. And for a smaller but well-respected institution such as Alma College,
having connections is like offering students more of the benefits of a major university.
Videoconferencing collaboration between faculty and students at Alma and Peabody College of Vanderbilt University is just one example of
how campuses can benefit from these advanced networking capabilities. In December 2004, Alma College faculty member Dr. Janet Navarro
provided a guest lecture to students in an undergraduate reading methods course at Peabody in Nashville—without setting foot off her
campus. At the invitation of Peabody faculty member Dr. Youb Kim, Navarro made her live presentation from a new video-enabled conference
room at Alma College equipped with a Polycom 7800 H.253 unit.
Navarro and Kim decided their first experiment was successful enough to try it again. In April 2005, Navarro lectured to a smaller group
during a graduate level seminar on balanced literacy. In contrast to the larger, undergrad style lecture, the seminar was much more interactive.
"The students were very engaged, interacting with each other, interrupting me with questions, Navarro explained. "I felt like I was in
the same room with them."
"The quality of the transmission was so good, it was not an impediment to the lecture in any way, agreed Warsop. "As an observer, I sensed
the same type of intimacy you get with in-person student-teacher interactions."
Previously, the latency on the network would have made this type of videoconferencing impossible. Brian Smokler, Warsop's technical
counterpart at Vanderbilt-Peabody, concurred. "Because both the Alma and Peabody endpoints are on Internet2, the videoconference was
automatically routed over the Internet2 backbone. The transmission and reception were as good as I have ever seen anywhere," he said.
Now that Merit has helped make this type of performance available, many more opportunities for guest lecturers and curriculum-expanding
activities are possible. Navarro discovered that most of the problems facing such inter-institutional collaborations were administrative
and practical, rather than technical. "The hassles we encountered resulted from our two campuses being in different time zones, having
different class schedules, and the fact that our students use different textbooks. These are all problems that can be taken care of with a
bit of advanced planning," she explained.
As a faculty member new to advanced networking technologies, Navarro's first experiences with videoconferencing had her thinking about the
potential for other collaborations. "Currently, my students must drive 60 miles to observe a professional instructor in a classroom setting.
Using videoconferencing, my pre-service teaching students could stay on campus at Alma and observe a teacher in a classroom setting
interacting with students, interrupt the teacher to ask questions, and still be less intrusive than having 25 strangers standing around
in a classroom." Because Merit also provides Internet services to many K-12 schools across Michigan, this type of scenario would require
only a moderately priced, portable videoconferencing endpoint to be set up in a teacher's classroom. Through connectivity to the Internet2
network backbone, Alma students could even be exposed to K-12 settings nationwide, providing them the opportunity to observe multi-lingual,
rural, inner city or other learning environments.
"With our network upgrade and direct connection to Merit, Alma faculty now have the potential to have this type of interactive collaboration
from any location on campus." concluded Warsop. "The technology is plug and play.
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