The University has contracted Adelphia Business Solutions to provide higher capacity communication circuits to serve Penn State campuses. The change will help the University to meet the increasing demand for telecommunications service from its campuses. Students from these areas will be able search Web resources more quickly for papers and reports, and faculty members will be able to use the network to more rapidly transmit large volumes of data, including video and three-dimensional images, to colleagues throughout the world.
The project, which will provide 45 Mbps service to each of the University's 24 locations, will yield an approximately 10-fold increase in the effective bandwidth available at each campus, compared to that presently available, with only a modest increase in cost. The first set of circuits to serve campuses at Hershey, Harrisburg, and Penn State Erie are already installed. Additional circuits to serve the remaining Penn State campus locations will be installed over the next five months.
According to Gary Augustson, vice provost for information technology, the need for higher bandwidth at these locations has expanded dramatically, due to the increase in student, faculty and staff Internet use.
"The upgrade addresses needs that have evolved with the electronic transformation of our community," Augustson said. "It will make it possible for students to download large files more quicklyand it will enable the University to have higher quality and significantly more cost-effective videoconferencing capabilities."
While evolution of the Penn State network has been ongoing, change of this magnitude was only recently financially feasible.
The change was enabled by increased competition in the telecommunications marketplace, nurtured by the efforts of Penn State. Increased competition for telecommunication services has been encouraged by Penn State for years and was strongly endorsed earlier this year when the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania awarded a bid for statewide service to a competitive local exchange service provider.
Although the upgrade will use the same general network design that has proven to be cost-effective in the past, all of the campuses above will now be directly connected to University Park. Upgrades to other campuses will be accomplished during the 2000-2001 academic year.