Managed Ethernet hits campus nets

As wish lists go, this one didn’t shoot the moon. The Cheltenham School District wanted voice and data connectivity in all its classrooms. The district wanted to make its online grading application more widely available and add an E911 capability that could pinpoint specific classroom numbers in the event of an emergency.

Working with Verizon and Alcatel, the schools are adding those capabilities as they deploy managed Ethernet services across their 20-square-mile district just north of Philadelphia. “We have convergence that results in better information to the classroom, which means better quality of information for students,” says Gary Bixby, director of facilities and support services for the district.

Local- and metro-area managed Ethernet services are a great fit for the education sector, given the high density and distributed nature of its end users. Whether it’s a university or a K-12 school, educational institutions frequently lack the personnel and budget to manage and administer thousands of Ethernet drops.

“Education is the second largest vertical industry for Ethernet services, accounting for 29% of total U.S. ports,” says Erin Dunne, director of research services for consultancy Vertical Systems Group. Ethernet is well suited for campus connectivity, high-bandwidth applications such as video learning or research.

Monthly per-port charges range from $1,000 to $10,000, depending on the speed of their connection (typically above 1.5 M bit/sec and up to 1G bit or more), the school’s distance from a carrier’s point of presence, and whether the link is carrier-owned or resold by a third party, Dunne says.

Procuring pipes

A hunger for high bandwidth led the Information Science Institute (ISI), part of the University of Southern California (USC), to join the Los Nettos Consortium. Los Nettos provides fat pipes and Internet access through Verio, Cogent Communications and other carriers. The Los Nettos Consortium includes USC, CalTech, Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Northrop Grumman Space Technology.

For about $8,300 a month, ISI gets a 100M bit/sec connection that can burst up to 1G bit if traffic loads permit. Los Nettos provides IP addresses for ISI’s demilitarized zone and handles the Border Gateway Protocol peering among the consortium members.

As for management, ISI gets access to Los Nettos’ network operations center, and can monitor overall circuit and network performance or track the progress of denial-of-service attacks, according to Richard Nelson, ISI’s director of computing in Los Angeles.

In addition, Los Nettos representatives meet monthly with the consortium members to present performance data and address service concerns. “They listen to us and have been very responsive – they’ve added IPv6, multicast and Internet2 connectivity for grid computing applications,” Nelson says. “So yes, we pay a premium for managed services, but what we get in return is a much better relationship with the provider and extremely reliable service.”

Having maxed out on its T-1 backbone, St. Joseph’s University turned to Yipes Enterprise Services in 2003. The university wanted the flexibility to add or subtract ports and capacity. It wanted 20M bit/sec connections in the slower summer months and 45M bit/sec the rest of the year, and it also required sufficient redundancy.

Students at the Philadelphia university rely on Web access for e-mail and portal services that let them register for classes, check grades and interact with professors via online course management tools, says Joe Petragnani, St. Joseph’s assistant vice president of networking and telecommunications. The network connects 55 buildings and about 7,000 users – students, faculty and staff.

Yipes brought a 100M bit/sec Ethernet circuit into St. Joseph’s data center and manages the service from the data center out to its point of presence. It ensures the 99.999% availability contracted in the service-level agreement (SLA) with the university, and contacts Petragnani’s department in the event of problems.

“They have a customer care Web site where we can check SLAs and bandwidth utilization, and get daily reports,” says Stacey Carlin, assistant director for network services for St. Joseph’s. “If we want something more granular, we put in a request and get the report back in 24 hours.” She would like to have direct, real-time access to Yipes’ network management performance data, similar to what she gets on campus by polling St. Joseph’s network nodes, but it’s not something Yipes or many other carriers offer yet.

Perhaps best of all, Yipes has proven itself to be price-competitive. St. Joseph’s had a three-year contract under which it paid about $6,000 a month for its Ethernet circuit and management, but a recent renegotiation brought that down to less than $4,000 a month.

Ethernet rates with E-Rate

Cheltenham’s Bixby says the school district’s decision to look at managed Ethernet services from Verizon was hastened by two developments. A Web application where teachers record attendance, assignments and grades, and can be viewed by parents and students, was slowing the network as more viewers logged on. That was costing teachers about 10 minutes of teaching time per day, Bixby says.

Separately, Bixby started tracing through records to find out who owned the fiber that connected the district’s eight buildings and 600 faculty and staff. He found it was installed several years ago by Bell Atlantic, now part of Verizon. The outside ownership was good news because it enabled the school district to qualify for an E-Rate discount given to schools and libraries needing Internet access. So while Cheltenham spends $120,000 annually for managed Ethernet services, the district gets an E-Rate discount of 40%, bringing its actual bill down to about $72,000. “We don’t have a lot of money in our district, so it had to be done in a creative way,” he says.

Verizon watches the school district’s network, making for better reliability and unexpected levels of responsiveness, Bixby says. “If anything happens, I get a call and they dispatch someone 24-7 within four hours. It’s impressive as all get-out,” Bixby says. The district has initiated a half dozen calls. The most serious was after a control board went down in one of the data switches. “The other times they’ve been out before I even knew we had a fault,” Bixby says.

The school uses an IP-PBX from Alcatel, and that vendor also steps in if needed, Bixby says. “With all three of us so tightly cooperating, there is never a problem we can’t solve.”

ISI’s Nelson and Petragnani of St. Joseph’s also point to the tighter relationships that managed Ethernet create with service providers. Monthly charges may cost more than raw bandwidth, but the better responsiveness means better service reliability. And that figures highly on any user’s wish list.

Sweeney is a freelance writer in Los Angeles. He can be reached at terry@tsweeney.com.