After almost a year of development that included holding 36 public workshops in person and online and reading through 23,000 public comments, the Federal Communications Commission has released its national broadband plan with a formal report to Congress. Calling high-speed Internet access "indispensable for the 21st century, the foundation for our economy, the foundation for our democracy in the digital age," FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski declared the plan "ambitious but achievable."
The University of Tennessee System will be linking to and using a new 10-gigabit IP network core built by AT&T for the state of Tennessee. The system will be expanding its use of NetTN, a custom-built virtual private network begun in 2008, to connect its five campuses statewide.
With the Internet antics of 54,000 students and 3,000 faculty and staff members, security analyst Brandon Johnson at Salt Lake Community College can easily chew up a day to figure out whose computer on campus is doing the dirty work of a botnet or what user was logged into a particular computer at a given time when law enforcement or HR comes calling.
One of the largest public universities in Brazil is beefing up its wireless infrastructure. The network at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil hosts 41,000 computers and thousands of other devices in use by 80,000 students and 6,000 faculty members on seven campuses.
The College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, VA has deployed an 802.11n wireless network that doesn't require a controller in a newly constructed building on campus.
The Keystone Initiative for Network-Based Education and Research (KINBER) is embarking on a statewide initiative to increase delivery of broadband throughout Pennsylvania. Known as the Pennsylvania Research and Education Network (PennREN), the project has attracted about $130 million in combined federal and private funding. KINBER is a coalition of Pennsylvania colleges and universities, research and healthcare organizations, and economic development entities.
A Chinese university has upgraded its wireless networking to 802.11n across multiple campuses, moving to a system that will better support its Mac OS X systems and provide greater wireless coverage. For the deployment, the university used WiFi gear from Aruba Networks.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is moving to Meraki wireless gear in its Stata Center. The Cambridge, MA institution will deploy 80 Meraki MR14 access points in "Building 32," a simultaneously angular and curving 720,000-square foot structure that houses the university's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), along with the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, and the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.
Provo, UT-based Brigham Young University has received a donation of $110,000 worth of Brocade FastIron WS Series and Edge X Series network switches from Red Sky IT Solutions. The network switches will replace outdated equipment in the classroom labs of Fulton College of Engineering and Technology as well as within the university's network infrastructure.
Vancouver Community College has completed a deployment of Enterasys network solutions in a 60,000 square-foot health sciences educational facility on the college's main campus.