Education Sector
In the demanding world of educational institutions, the term “services” has come to mean more than just water, electricity and telephone: it also includes cutting-edge communications. The current trend of communications has moved from disparate data and voice communications to converged networks that provide what the user needs: data, voice, video, or any mix of those. The key word in converged solutions is IP Telephony (IPT), which includes voice over IP, fax over IP and video over IP, all built on top of a reliable data network.
Classroom lessons based on the lecture/note-taking format against a fixed set of information are evolving to “guided learning” based on networked access to worldwide information that students explore in teams. Information assimilation and interpretation are now classroom fundamentals, alongside reading, writing and arithmetic. Technology has created higher expectations on the part of school staff, parents and the community. People expect schools to provide the same instant, convenient access to information that they now enjoy at work or shopping online. Parents and students alike expect constant connectivity and instant communications. Whether e-mailing homework assignments to absent students, alerting the community to snow day closings, scheduling parent-teacher conferences—there are simple communication solutions that can accomplish these and many other challenges conveniently and cost-effectively.
The vision is total access to data and voice, anywhere, anytime. Students should be given the option of accessing those services from their dorms or classrooms, either through wired of wireless connectivity. Moreover, the school grounds will be completely covered with wireless data and voice access, meaning that students and teachers will be able to use there laptops anywhere to connect to the School’s LAN and to use their wireless IP phones and PDAs to connect to the voice network. With this said, we should also be aware of the bandwidth and management requirements for such an undertaking, an issue which will also be taken into account and designed for in the proposed solution.
