Higher education goes back to school on communication technologies

Changes in communication technologies are forcing higher education to make big, expensive, and potentially risky decisions, according to two campus CIOs speaking at this week's fall seminar for ACUTA, an association of higher education IT professionals.

Boston College is planning to converge separate voice and cable TV networks over an expanding IP infrastructure, while University of Massachusetts at Amherst is devoting extensive resources to create a directory-based identity management system spanning networks and institutions.

The CIOs for both institutions are trying to judge when the time is right to implement rapidly emerging communications advances. “I’m not too concerned about being on the bleeding edge,” John Drubach, UMass CIO told the seminar audience. “I’m happy to have volunteers in the audience bleed for me.”

BC’s decision to converge its traditional copper telephone network, coax cable TV network, and IP data network has several drivers, said Marian Moore, the college’s CIO. One is to simplify tech support, and cut its costs. Another is the dramatic changes in phone use by students, who now rely on personal cell phones rather than college-supplied wired phones in their dorm rooms. “They don’t need us anymore,” she said.

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A third, is the rapidly growing demand for various premium cable TV services, including high-definition and faculty-created video content for classes. Finally, there is the technology dead-end of traditional TDM phone gear, in this case a carrier-class Nortel MSC-100 telephone switch.

BC is considering discontinuing student voice services entirely, while leaving a handful of local-calling, landline phones on each dorm floor. At the same time, the college faces a potentially costly problem: how to improve cellular coverage and performance especially in the dorms. Moore suggested the problem may eventually solve itself, as the campus Wi-Fi network becomes more pervasive and cell phones with Wi-Fi adapters become more common.

Switching to VoIP should create enough savings to finance the switch, she said. BC is planning to add 1 million square feet of new building space over the next decade. Based on recent college construction, BC expects to save hundreds of thousands of dollars by using Ethernet and coax for VoIP rather than also having to run copper phone wire. But figuring out backup power to ensure handsets are always dial-tone ready, and bringing VoIP reliability up to the 99.999% uptime of TDM networks will remain key challenges.

Video services will be supplied probably by means of a hybrid solution, Moore said. When the cable TV contract expires in mid-2009, BC will shift to digital IP video, and likely contract with a distributor for a satellite or land-based digital feed. The college may deploy Video Furnace hardware and software to stream live and pre-encoded MPEG video over IP networks to PCs and televisions. Finally, Moore wants to outsource IPTV, tiered services, and subscriber management.