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College Helps Bring Fast Access to Rural County November 27, 2000 By Kelly Jackson Higgins It's the rural trade-off. Berkshire County, Mass., the home of Williams College, is a nice place to live, but for a long time you couldn't get a fast Internet connection there. Not until some Williams grads launched a dot-com start-up in the mid-1990s to offer information services to students did the lack of high-speed services hit home: They couldn't get the dual DS-3 connections they needed for their servers. So they relocated the company, a spin-off from a senior project, and its server farm to New Jersey, where they could easily get two DS-3s from two different carriers. The loss of a hot dot-com and potential jobs in this county of 7,000 people sparked a local movement to get Berkshire County -- and Williams College -- access to fat pipes. So the county secured state funding, and Global Crossings and New England Digital Distribution won a contract with the county for a wireless dual OC-3 network, bypassing local telco Bell Atlantic (now Verizon). The goal was to get the kind of high-end telecom services common in urban areas for the same price, says Mark Berman, Williams' director for networks and systems, who served on the steering committee that came up with the county's initial business and technology plan. Now not only do dot-coms spin off from Williams College and stay in Berkshire County, but the college itself has the bandwidth to add long-distance voice to its microwave digital DS-3 connection to the OC-3 wireless network. The microwave dish sits atop the liberal arts college's brand-new, $42 million science complex, and about 12 Mb of that network--with an HSSI interface--is reserved for Internet data traffic. "In the next six months, we'll be taking three T1s off the DS-3 for long-distance voice service," Berman says. The wireless access gave Williams three times the Internet bandwidth for about 20 percent less cost, he says. Williams' internal network also grew some bandwidth muscle recently. The college now runs a gigabit backbone and is phasing in 802.1Q-based VLANs (virtual LANs) for its printers, faculty and students. Each dorm room in the 2,100-student college has an Ethernet port. There's already a Cisco Systems-based VLAN for administration, logically separate from the rest of the network, which traditionally has run on Cabletron Systems switches. Williams is now phasing out its Cabletron SecureFast technology, which prevents broadcasts from flooding the network, in favor of 802.1Q-based VLANs. The move is more of a practical matter: 802.1Q-based VLANs are the standard, and Cabletron's product is in its twilight. It's a trade-off, Berman says, as there are fewer features with 802.1Q-based VLANs and now the college will be routing instead of just switching. The other catch is that Williams, like many colleges and universities, runs more than just IP in its backbone, and not all equipment routes non-IP traffic as intelligently as IP. "We still have a lot of AppleTalk, NetBUI, IPX and DECnet," Berman says. With the exception of Cisco equipment, "some switches don't deal with these protocols very well," he adds. Later this fall, Williams' LDAP directory, which plucks information from its student information system and human-resources applications, will go online with a central password-changing feature for users who forget or want to change their passwords. "Before, you had to make the changes in two or three different places," Berman says. Next for the college is streaming multimedia, which will mean turning on the QoS (Quality of Service) functions in the Layer 3 and Layer 4 switches for the campus. The college already uses QoS for its Internet traffic -- streaming traffic gets the highest priority and Napster, for instance, the lowest.
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