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Broadband Access
Qwest takes fiber to the school
Enables Jefferson County School District to make 100 Mbps Ethernet leap
by Sean Buckley
Beginning this July, students in Colorado’s Jefferson County will add a new amenity to their class list: a 100Mbps Ethernet line courtesy of Qwest Communications.
Under a $16 million, 10-year deal signed with Qwest, the Jefferson district will connect 107 schools with 100Mbps Ethernet service. Upon completion, 150 school sites will have fiber-based 100Mbps Ethernet connectivity.
Jefferson, however, is no stranger to Ethernet. Seventeen high schools and 19 middle schools already have the Qwest Metro Optical Ethernet (QMOE) service.
And while extending Ethernet service to students is a new move for Jefferson County, Brett Miller, the district’s executive director of infrastructure services, says Ethernet is yet another initiative to enhance the student learning experience.
“This is the next step in evolution from the mid-’90s when we moved out of the mainframe world,” he said. “We kind of built the infrastructure that got us to this point. Back then we [dealt] with closed labs and environments and today it’s a global learning community the kids are involved in.” (See: Qwest soups up Colorado school district’s learning engine)
Quantum leap of faith
With the majority of the district’s sites served by legacy T1 (1.5Mbps) service, Jefferson’s move to bring 100Mbps Ethernet to its schools is nothing short of a quantum leap of faith. At this point, Jefferson has connected 38 secondary schools with QMOE; the elementary schools have a full T1.
“The secondary schools are capped at 15Mbps, but when we kick off the project in July we’ll open that pipe all the way to 100Mbps and let them take advantage of the bigger pipe,” Miller says.
In a process that’s expected to take about 24 months, Qwest plans to light up five sites per month. The time it takes to install the service likely will depend on the availability of fiber as well as related construction and customer issues.
Qwest will equip each site with Cisco 3750 edge devices [to] deliver the service. What has helped Jefferson make this migration to 100Mbps Ethernet, Miller explains, is Qwest’s ability to act as a member of their team.
“You can’t say enough good things about [Qwest]; it’s a very strong partnership,” he says. “They came to the table recently with our VoIP implementation and are helping us through that. The responsiveness of their engineering team has been great, which is something we look for. We want the long-term relationships vs. the one-to-two year relationships.”
Sharon Montgomery, Qwest’s vice president of government and education services, agrees such deployments require a partner that can work through all aspects of a large deployment even after the sale has been made.
“They’re moving from a T1 (1.5 Mbps) to each school to a 100 Mps service now, so who are you going to pick to be that trusted partner that you’re going to make that leap of faith with,” she said.“We looked at this from a school district perspective and at the opportunity: as a very big umbrella for leveraging services to the community with this fiber deployment.”
Future proof bandwidth
With all the applications Jefferson wants to run over its Ethernet network, fiber will be the glue holding together current and potential future services.
“There’s a drive of applications over a network for school districts that’s really increasing the requirements for bandwidth,” Montgomery says. “And from a fiber deployment standpoint, you’re really being efficient on the dollars you’re spending today because [with fiber] whatever you do today can be leveraged against an investment in a future technology.”
To extend the fiber-based Ethernet service to the schools, Qwest has taken a leverage-and extend-approach that uses its existing assets to support its broadband service rollouts.
“A lot of times when you’re talking about an elementary school or even junior high, they are out in residential communities where to date there’s not a lot of fiber distribution,” Montgomery says. “With our deployment of fiber-to-the-node, we’re bringing fiber into communities [and] leveraging it for schools.”
From a bigger picture perspective, Qwest also looks at the required investment for each school district project and the projected revenue, while helping schools bring the costs to make Ethernet or another advanced technology justifiable to deploy.
In addition, Qwest will work with school districts to better understand how they can leverage available funding from the FCC’s E-Rate Schools and Libraries program for communications projects.
Jefferson is certainly not alone in its desire to expand the education experience. Montgomery says other districts served by Qwest have already deployed fiber-based Ethernet and are now requiring 1Gbps of capacity.
Meanwhile, Verizon continues to progress in providing optical Ethernet service to local school districts. The Northeast-based ILEC recently won a deal to upgrade the Petersburg, VA public schools’ copper and ATM-based network to optical Ethernet.
Not surprisingly, a fiber-based product can’t reach everywhere. Where Qwest can’t extend fiber, especially into remote areas, it will work with Jefferson to deploy a bonded T1 service as a near-term solution.
“We have a couple mountain area schools where we are doubling some T1s,” Miller says. “I believe the biggest one is a high school in the mountain area and that would have eight T1s. It’s not that big as a pipe, but we just don’t have the capability to bring that to them just yet, but for the most part it’s the majority of the district.”
Applications are the driver
At the end of the day, a big fat Ethernet pipe is nothing without a host of new applications. In addition to extending distance learning applications (a service that will allow interaction with other educational facilities), Jefferson is in the process of offering online testing capabilities to students.
Jefferson plans to offer an online credit recovery program to students and teachers, which Miller explains “is something [for] students who are either failing or need to recover their credits.”
Jefferson is finding it will be able to leverage the expanded Ethernet pipe for other projects, including a district-wide VoIP network and enterprise wireless services.
The VoIP network currently serves half the district and Jefferson has completed 70 percent of a wireless network with Aruba Wireless. In addition, Jefferson is talking to other city IT departments about establishing a liaison for fire and police emergency response.
One of the network deployment’s surprises was that in addition to providing new student and teacher services it will create other network efficiencies not possible with a standard T1 circuit.
“There’s a lot of stuff driving more discussions about what we can do now that we’re going in this direction,” Miller says. “Currently, we have file servers in each school, so there’s talk about centralized storage … to control and manage the data. We’ll have to prioritize and figure out where [everything] falls in the big plan.”
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