Spokane, Wash. - When Dick Hol began pushing for an educational metropolitan-area network -- or E-MAN -- a little over a year ago, the district director of information systems for the community college of Spokane wasn't thinking about Gigabit Ethernet.
E-MAN was conceived as a broadband, multimedia network designed to link 13 educational institutions from K-12 school districts to community colleges and public universities in Spokane, Washington.
"A year ago, we thought ATM was the only solution," Hol said. That belief probably originated because integrated voice capability was part of the requirement to link the school system.
So when Hol and officials from the 12 other agencies in the city's educational system put together a formal call for proposals, they were surprised that Gigabit Ethernet vendor Packet Engines Inc. responded.
Packet Engines, which began life in the Bay area and moved to Spokane in 1994, doesn't do much ATM, and the five other bids the school received were all from companies pitching ATM solutions.
"We were all fairly skeptical," about Gigabit Ethernet in a metropolitan-area network, said Dennis Schweikhardt, manager of technology infrastructure for Spokane School District 81.
Skeptical, that is, until Brian MacLeod, Packet Engine's director of marketing, proved that Gigabit Ethernet could handle tasks the educational executives thought only ATM could do.
For example, MacLeod oversubscribed a 1G bit/sec pipe by a factor of three and then, by applying quality-of-service capabilities, showed Gigabit Ethernet could still support "crystal-clear video." MacLeod also demonstrated IP multicast with video and video on demand.
But perhaps the most impressive thing was that, using a Netrix Corp. voice-over-IP gateway hooked up to Packet Engine's switches, the administrators could make calls across the data network.
The demo helped swing the unusual Gigabit Ethernet WAN deal for Packet Engines. "The cost of ATM and Gigabit Ethernet was somewhat comparable," claimed Hol. But Hol said the schools felt Gigabit Ethernet would be more manageable because technical staffers were familiar with it.
In April, the school district awarded the E-MAN contract to Packet Engines and Washington Water Power Fiber (WWP), a local power company subsidiary that will provide dark fiber to link buildings.
For Packet Engines, the deal means about $1.7 million in revenue; the rest of the $10 million allocated for phase one of the E-MAN project will go to WWP for the installation of the single-mode fiber.
Each location on the E-MAN will have one Packet Engines PowerRail 1000 Routing Switch and one Netrix box.
The PowerRail 1000 is a stackable Layer 3 switch with a throughput of nearly 6 million packet/sec for IPv4, IPv6 and IPX traffic. It has 20 autosensing 10/100M-bit-per-second Ethernet ports and two Gigabit Ethernet ports.
For redundancy, the consortium is building five fiber rings, supporting from eight to 12 locations on each ring. Each location will have two connections to the network.
The central administration building for District 81 will be outfitted with a PowerRail 5200, a chassis-based Layer 3 switch with a throughput of almost 37 million packet/sec.
The 5200 can support up to 25 Gigabit Ethernet ports. The administration building will also have eight Netrix boxes. The Netrix Network Exchange 2210 sits between the Packet Engines switch and the PBX, converting voice signals into packets so that they can be switched across the data network.
"We're using the IP [Type of Service] indicator to give the voice traffic priority over data applications in this network," said Steve Byars, chief technology officer at Netrix. The Type of Service field, which resides in the IP header, allows applications to identify higher-priority traffic to routing switches.
E-MAN will improve Internet access, cut telephony costs and support a video-on-demand capability that enables educators to pull down video training materials as they need them, which means no more checking movies out of the A/V room.
The network will also enable schools to participate in multicast presentations of lectures and other programs. But Schweikhardt said the school district is hoping the project leads to something even more important: turning out tech-savvy kids. By using the Internet and relying more on computers, students will learn how to think in new ways.
Further down the road, he hopes the E-MAN will be expanded to provide the infrastructure to attract high-tech and manufacturing companies to the region.
"This network is fundamentally a revolution that will enable us to do things that we cannot do today. The impact is going to be felt for years, in ways that I can't even predict," Schweikhardt said.
"Gigabit Ethernet troops just moved into the trenches. This authenticates Gigabit Ethernet as a candidate for metropolitan-area network applications," said Steve Bell, president and CEO of The Silicon Valley Networking Lab, a new network equipment test center in Palo Alto.
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