Fiber Goes to School

Pennsylvania Educational Group Builds Network for Internet Access, More

Several school districts in York County joined forces with the York Area Technology in Education Consortium (YATEC) to bring these capabilities to students. The effort grew out of the districts' need to share course information within a single network.

"This allows the districts to expand their curricular offerings and tie into institutions of higher learning to offer high school students college-level courses," says Dick Evans, first chairman of YATEC and a founding board member of the consortium. "The districts also want to be able to offer online conferences and workshops to teachers to reduce the time and costs related to travel."

YATEC checked out 28 companies that handle hardware, software, Internet access and network connectivity before selecting a network design from Coudersport, Pa.-based Hyperion Communications Inc., a leading competitive local exchange carrier (CLEC) and a subsidiary of Adelphia Communications Corp. Hyperion teamed up with BlazeNet, an Internet service provider (ISP) based in York and a subsidiary of Susquehanna Pfaltzgraff Co., using equipment from Richardson, Texas-based Fujitsu Network Communications Inc.

Passing the Test

Evans says YATEC wanted a network that could handle different protocols, transport high-quality video and share hardware that would provide those on the network with access to each other as well as to the Internet. The consortium went live with a wide area network (WAN) that connects the districts' administrative and school buildings to a Hyperion central office (CO) in York County.

Four YATEC member school districts tied into the network. Central York has eight buildings connected, York Suburban and Dallastown each have five and West York has four. The York City and Dover districts also are members of YATEC and soon will join the network.

The consortium's primary goal was to have a state-of-the-art network infrastructure. "We wanted to create a network with high-speed access, high bandwidth, high reliability, and little to no lag time--particularly for Internet access," Evans says. "We were aware that our member school districts could not afford to have teachers and students waiting for a website to load or files to download."

The network provides native 10Base-T Ethernet connections at each site with Internet access provided by dual-redundant T1 connections to network access points in Washington and New York. There are four separate OC-3 rings spread throughout the county, with a total of about 20 school buildings on those rings (see diagram, "The YATEC Network," below).

Image: The YATEC Network

Fujitsu Network Communications' FACTR synchronous optical network (SONET) access and transport platform is in place at each school building, and each school uses a FASTLANE Ethernet local area network (LAN) interconnection card set from Fujitsu. The FASTLANE cards provide provisionable bandwidth, with the YATEC services running at 3 megabits per second (mbps) to 10mbps.

The Ethernet traffic is converted to asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) cells and transported across the OC-3 SONET access rings. At the CO, the traffic is terminated as DS-3 drops on Fujitsu FLM 150 lightwave add/drop multiplexers (ADMs). The DS-3 user network interface (UNI) signals are placed on an OC-12 backbone ring. The OC-12 ring connects to the BlazeNet ISP site, where an ATM switch and router converts the DS-3 UNI ATM signals back to Ethernet frames and provides the Internet access connection.

"The OC-12 ring is transparent from an Ethernet or ATM perspective," says Hyperion's Bob Guth, the project's general manager. "It was important to make the transport piece transparent between the CO and BlazeNet."

Schools of Thought

YATEC chose this network design over one carrier's frame relay solution. The consortium also considered private fiber network designs from separate construction companies. Reliability was a key factor in YATEC's decision, as was the network topology of the Hyperion design. BlazeNet's Internet expertise also contributed to YATEC's confidence in choosing the design.

Originally, the network design required the school districts to buy a large number of routers. In this scenario, Hyperion would have handed off T1s to be carried back to BlazeNet. As the project proceeded, the school districts sought ways to cut their capital expenses. They asked Hyperion to take on the routing functions so they could pay for the service--not the equipment.

"Our reason for getting into the enhanced data service business was to turn what would have been a big, one-time customer expense into an ongoing service expense," Guth says.

Hyperion worked with Fujitsu to commercialize the FASTLANE product with the FACTR platform. Because Hyperion wanted to offer voice service as well as data, the company was set on using the FACTR access/transport system.

The resulting network setup lends itself to applications outside the school environment as well.

"It's a great solution for metropolitan area network (MAN)-type requirements and large corporations with campus environments or multiple buildings in a city," Guth says. "Banking is also a potential application. Basically, anybody who has a mesh network, as opposed to a star network, is a good candidate."

Guth points to increased reliability and higher bandwidth as advantages of FASTLANE and SONET rings over frame relay and switched multimegabit data service (SMDS). Cost savings is another benefit, since less equipment is required to hand off an Ethernet connection than a frame relay or SMDS connection.

With the network design in place, each school district is connected with 3mbps to 10mbps of bandwidth to the ISP. The network's total backbone capacity is 45mbps.

Questions and Answers

One concern about the network was whether it could handle simultaneous requests from several users.

"Within 45 days of the network going live, 228 students at Central York signed on from different computers and intentionally requested the same website at the same time," Evans says. "In less than two seconds, every user had access to the site."

There also was concern about whether two different suppliers' equipment would communicate--in this case, providing the Ethernet-to-ATM cell conversion on different products. In addition, the network carries both Internet protocol (IP) and AppleTalk traffic, which created some initial network challenges.

Regular IP traffic passed through the network without problems, but the AppleTalk locations would get disconnected. This required the equipment to be reset to bring those locations back on the network. The solution was to segment the IP and AppleTalk connections outside the ATM switch, resulting in what Guth described as a clean hand-off between the two suppliers' equipment.

Currently, the network primarily is used for Internet access and research purposes. Each district also uses the network to share data among its own school buildings as well as to connect to the best educational resources the other districts have to offer. Still, each district independently maintains its own technology program.

"There have been benefits in the classrooms within each of the member districts in terms of expanding course content," says Jim Slobozien, current chairman of YATEC and a founding board member. "Students can use the network to sign on to the Internet to communicate with people all around the world, from experts in their field to students involved in similar projects."

Graduating to the Next Level

For example, YATEC is considering doing collaborative work with Millersville University, Millersville, Pa. Located approximately 25 miles from the school districts, the university also is connected to the network. It is developing and testing a distance-learning pilot program that will allow YATEC to expand the curriculum offered in York County further. Access to Millersville University could open the door for other colleges to join the network initiated by YATEC.

Distance learning also offers benefits between districts, where each district has a particular strength that can be shared. An initial district-to-district test of distance learning, between Dallastown and York Suburban, will identify whether such an application is possible and will gauge the network's video capabilities.

Cost is a barrier to quicker expansion, but the consortium is working to cut the price to participants to make it competitive with the popular, straight-T1 access available from other providers.

YATEC member districts on the network each currently pay about $63,000 per year, which is significantly less than the more than $1.2 million a year each would have paid to put in their own individual network, Evans explains. Separately, the districts would not have been able to achieve the bandwidth and speed they have as a group, he says.

The four member districts of YATEC that are connected to the network have 12,000 to 13,000 K-12 students. The total enrollment of all 16 districts in York County is 34,000 students. York City, a member of YATEC with plans to tie into the network, has the largest enrollment with 7,700 students.

YATEC anticipated all or most of the York County school districts becoming members by the beginning of the 1999 school year--first as members of the consortium, then as active members on the network.

The network's SONET rings give YATEC access to the Internet via two "dedicated" T1 lines through the ISP. Maximum capacity use for the entire network was only approaching 10 percent near the end of the 1997 school year, Slobozien explains. So YATEC has a long way to go to use all the capacity in place.

Physically expanding the YATEC network is not difficult. Hyperion can add schools to the existing rings or turn up additional rings. The rings also support voice services for other schools, as well as other business customers' telecommunications traffic.

The network's scalability allows expansion as the districts use their technologies more effectively and as YATEC increases its membership, bringing more districts and students onto the network. As new school districts join the network and existing ones broaden their technology program, they can help each other grow and learn. The districts can benefit from each other's experience with hardware, software and applications.

"By creating a pool of knowledge, the districts can lower the learning curve," Slobozien says.

Joining forces has allowed the YATEC member school districts to build a cost-effective network in which common resources improve students' scholastic opportunities. With the schools' computers tied into the Internet and through distance learning, students now have access to educational information that once was far beyond their reach.

Sherry Davis is regional market manager at Hyperion Communications Inc., Coudersport, Pa. She can be reached at (412) 220-5129 or sdavis@hyperion.net.

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