Meeting of the minds - Grand Rapids Community College uses Lucent Technologies' Lucent Technologies Cajun network switch - Product Information

Communications News, June, 1999

Michigan community college graduates to ATM switching.

Grand Rapids Community College (GRCC), a two-year institution in Michigan that serves more than 25,000 students and offers more than 1,000 courses, has long been committed to an information-technology infrastructure that matches the quality of its faculty, campus, and students. Early on, for instance, GRCC had a vision for providing distance learning through video-on-demand as an important new learning medium for the future. The college has built a robust infrastructure to support this emerging offering.

This networking infrastructure delivers full-motion video and high-quality audio--along with traditional computer data to students' desktops in classrooms and labs. Today this network extends to 1,700 endpoints in 11 buildings in downtown Grand Rapids.

The state-of-the-art network backbone uses asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) as the switching technology, chiefly because it provides the quality of service necessary to deliver voice and video applications to end users with speed and clarity without letting traditional, lower-priority data slow it down. Other data-networking technologies don't guarantee this quality and tend to deliver voice and video with distracting stops and starts.

Among the places this ATM backbone will deliver high-quality multimedia applications is the new Richard Calkins Science Center, which will open its doors January 2000. The college also needs to bring this building into the school's PBX (private branch exchange) network. With ATM, the college can use the same network for both purposes. The computer network could link three remote PBX telephone switches, including that of the science building, to the school's central PBX switch.

Putting the PBXs on the ATM backbone enables GRCC to:

* Add hundreds of new telephones to the school's central switching system to accommodate growth;

* Prepare the college to use a single infrastructure to deliver voice, video, and data;

* Extend the school's investment by eventually letting the same hardware that links the remote and central PBXs double as a "regular" network switch that's part of the campus backbone; and

* Prepare for emerging mixed voice, video, and data-calling applications that will leverage the PBX's capabilities, such as real-time call control, conferencing, and messaging.

To begin this "network convergence" process, GRCC turned to Lucent Technologies. Lucent data applications manager, Jeffrey Morris, reviewed the college's strategic plan and recommended the Cajun A500 ATM switch as a central component of the upgrade. The 10-Gbps switch is designed to integrate data, voice, and video traffic across a campus network backbone. The Cajun A500 is the only switch in its class to provide the clock synchronization needed to interoperate with PBX voice systems such as GRCC's Lucent DEFINITY enterprise communications server.

"We've moved forward to bring PBX connectivity together via ATM and the Cajun A500 ATM switch, and we've already taken the next step--bringing our two networks together," says the college's hardware and communications manager, Bob Eluskie.

The migration has been seamless. "No one on campus would know the difference. The Cajun A500 hasn't gone down once, nor have any of our Lucent products," Eluskie says. "We're very pleased with the product reliability. Lucent's a very strategic vendor of ours."

If it sounds like overkill to link PBXs together with an industrial-strength switch like the Cajun A500, it's not, says Eluskie. Today's overkill is tomorrow's necessity. "It's better to have the bandwidth and functionality now and be able to provide for other bandwidth-intensive, multimedia technology across this network," he says. "It won't be long before we have just one device on our desktops instead of both a computer and a phone. Our single network will be well-suited to that single device."

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