Networking & Wireless
Washington State's K-20 Education Network Upgrades WAN
The K-20 Education Network, a publicly
supported network supporting educational institutions throughout the state of
Washington, is upgrading its wide area network (WAN) infrastructure to provide
high speed communications to 101 higher education institutions, K-12 school
districts and libraries.
The goal of the network upgrade was to ensure that K-20 could support the
hundreds of data-intensive applications used by its member organizations for
school administration, distance learning and operations. "As the largest
education network in the state of Washington, we need to be able to connect
thousands of students, multiple schools and several organizations
together," said Mike Scroggins, deputy executive director of information
technology for the State Board for Community and Technical Colleges and chair
of the K-20 Network Consortium, in a prepared statement.
The WAN upgrade uses a fiber diverse, hub-and-spoke Ethernet virtual private
line (EVPL) from Comcast Business.
K-20's 101 member organizations are spoke locations that use Comcast Business's
high availability Ethernet solutions platform to connect to K-20's hub at its
main data center. K-20's network hub in Seattle uses two 100 gigabit (Gb) fiber
circuits to supply the network with more than 200 Gb per second of data
throughput. High bandwidth, dedicated connectivity for colleges and school
districts ranges from 100 megabits per second (Mbps) to 10 Gbps per circuit.
According to information from Comcast Business, the solution provides K-20
with a high-availability, high-performance network that will let the
organization "grow quickly and seamlessly as future network demands
increase."
About the Author
Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].
