Does YOUR school have it's own OC-192?

[desmocat]

I was reading in the local paper today on how several of the the school districts in Texas have networks that rival some of the major service providers and web hosting companies in the WHOLE country.
For instance:
This fall, the students in Round Rock Tx (just north of Austin) will have their very own OC-192 network.
There are only 32,645 students, but their network will have a capacity of 9.95 GIGABITS per second of data transfer.
This is the same carrier that is used by Qwest to provide service to the likes of Sprint, AT&T, and MCI for long distance and data service.
Umm, I believe in building in scalability, but I think this is kind of overkill, don't you think?
There are several school districts in the D-Fw are that have the following:
( Keep in mind these aren't universities, but public school districts)

SONET networks, with various capacities from OC-3(155 Mbps)
OC-12 (622 Mbps) and OC-48 (2.48 Gbps)
Several of the schools are using ATM to connect the various buildings in the school system.
The last time I did any research, an OC-48 line would run you about 50,000 bucks a MONTH !
GAAA! where are they getting all the money for this equipment and telco charges?
They did several studies that showed that network usage was only about 1 to 5%.
But the districts said that would increase when they started implementing streaming video to the various campuses.
Several ISD's were also wanting to put Gigabit ethernet in place, (both fiber and over copper) but they couldn't fully implement it because most of the computers weren't new enough to support the new Gbit NICS.
Here I was thinking that all the big corps had the good stuff, and lo and behold, the schools have it!

My next question, how are they going to pay the people with the knowledge to fully utilize all this high capacity to it's potential?
I can see them having good people to choose from right now since the indusrty is slow, but whats going to happen when things pick back up and they start jumping ship when the big dollar offers come back?
As far as the OC-192 stuff, I wanna see what kind of routers and switches they have to get all this stuff going. droolll
I guess it boils down to two words: CHA-CHING!

[hawkeye177]

Our school only has a T1 line and it is slow because there about 300 people on the internet at a time. We have 3000+ student

[Jutral]

I've always felt lucky to have a T1 at our high school. We live in an area where we can't even get DSL or Cable yet. But, for a school of only 1000 students (K-12) a T1 is more than enough. I don't think the brains of half the students manage to keep up with the speed of everything as it is now

[Warthog]

I think we have a T1....

But it's NOT blazing fast!

My school (high/middle school) has probably a total of 800-1000 students. The connection is at MOST as fast as my 56k...usually not even that much

Warthog

[me4get]

There is a Federal charge on all phone bills that helps pay for Internet access at all Public Schools in the US.

[ChoaticWhisper]

My high school has a T1, It was really slow, I dont know if it was because the network was setup really badly or there was so many people on it.
I think that the school had around 800-1000 students, every teacher had they're own computer and the libary had about 10 computers the computer lab had around 30 and the typing class had around 30. I know not every one was on the net at the same time. I guess the network was pretty bad, maybe just alot of hubs, lol.

[willy_ph]

My university is connected to an Onet Networks GigaPop.

However, I'm not sure of the total bandwidth that is offered by the connection. Unfortunately, they don't offer internet services in the residence rooms, thereby reducing their network maintainance and infrastructure costs.

[Warthog]

ChoaticWhisper - that's about exactly what my school is like.

I dunno why it's not blazing fast...oh well, I don't really care

[Atomic Rooster]

You can thank Al Bore for the phone surcharge to connect/wire all schools to the internet. Don't forget, he also invented the internet too.

[ironforge]

Yeah.. well usually politicians formulate ideas and plans before they think about how to get the money for it..

so like you said.. he invented the internet... and needed a way to pay for it.. so he slapped on a tax..