Canada's Most Connected Campuses

From the trail-blazing connectivity at the University of British Columbia, to more recent installations in Atlantic Canada, this country is leading the way in campus connectivity. At the grade school level, too!

The fact that individual provincial agencies look after their own educational mandates has in some ways spurred them on in the race to be the best, and most well-regarded, learning providers in the country.

At the time, UBC's huge wired and wireless networking environment was called the largest of its kind. As part of a major infrastructure project, more than $30 million dollars was spent to kick start the system, with some 18,500 ports installed or upgraded across the university's 1,000 acre campus. It's a great recruitment tool!

At Saint Mary's in Nova Scotia, students and faculty alike are celebrating the recent launch of what's called the Data Cave. Their online virtual reality environment allows researchers, academics and students to visualize graphic representations of phenomena based on scientific calculations. A host of IT and networking partners combined to fund the connectivity project, and the campuses of sister universities such as Memorial University in Newfoundland, University of New Brunswick, Dalhousie University, St. Francis Xavier and others are connected by similar initiatives.

At Montreal's Concordia University, the country's first 802.11n wireless network on a university campus has been incorporated as part of a larger, innovative indoor-outdoor wireless mobility infrastructure.?? More than 1,250 Wi-Fi certified access points from Cisco provide the gateway to a huge mesh network that also offers mobile phone and data storage services.

At the Rotman School of Business, part of the University of Toronto, wireless networking was developed as part of the overall campus environment, and it is a strong selling point at the well-respected institution.

The University already had point-to-point wireless links on its downtown campus. It expanded that service with a wireless local area network (WLAN) that now services all three U of T campuses - downtown, as well as those in Mississauga and Scarborough.

Within the first few months, some 2,000 people - students, faculty and staff alike - became registered users who could all access the WLAN concurrently from 25 different buildings, without the capacity of the network being challenged.

"We expect that registration figure to climb steadily as the wireless coverage eventually expands to all 200 of our buildings," said Norman Housley, the University's manager of network design and implementation services, at the time. "[W]ireless has now become a standard operating procedure to help us complete the networking of the University."

Rotman's wireless network is simultaneously able to handle both the 802.11b standard, which moves information along at 11 megabits per second (Mbps), as well as 802.11a, 54 Mbps standard, almost five times faster.

Also located in downtown Toronto, the campus of Ryerson University, where a gigabit-speed network serves more than 50,000 users. But, having gone with a Wi-Fi topology, Ryerson found additional challenges come with the terrain:

"We have a densely packed urban campus in the middle of Toronto, and while Wi-Fi offers the greatest flexibility with regard to our daily network needs, ours is a challenging RF environment," Ken Woo, Ryerson University's assistant director for Communications Support, said at the time of installation.?? "Network performance is especially critical for the 3,000 students associated with Ted Rogers School of Business Management.?? Substantial deployment savings were achieved by minimizing wired ports in favor of using the wireless LAN as the primary access method. More than 1,000 students are simultaneously online at any given time, and rely on the wireless network for classes, printing, and real-time tests.?? Access points are spaced roughly every 20 feet throughout the three floor building."

Ryerson worked with vendors such as Aruba Networks and Fortinet on the network, and on its defence. Ryerson deployed more than 40 security appliances provide multi-threat protection for the network, a big concern for any network operator or IT administrator, whether on campus or not.