Monterey Bay welcomes high-speed network

University Business, June, 2005

There's a new high-speed network in Monterey Bay, Calif., and it is open to the entire community. With much pride and fanfare, California State Monterey Bay launched a high-speed network this spring that will not only help its students and faculty, but the entire municipality.

Cal State's Networked University project provides a gigabyte of connectivity to a number of users in the area, including staff at 30 other research institutions on the peninsula, the K-12 school district, employees at city hall, EMS workers, and several hundred area nonprofit agencies.

The new network, which uses Cisco technology, replaces other technology that first linked all the institutions two years ago. The network allows for the university and all related agencies to share data more quickly, along with rich media and video clips. The latter is important to Cal State's service learning initiatives. Many students earn academic credits by interning at local social service agencies, maritime research centers and environmental organizations, explains Gil Gonzales, CTO of Cat State Monterey. Through the network they can provide online training to other staffers and share research from various locations.

Gonzales employs an engineer who dedicates his time to network operations. Technically, the town charges users a nominal fee to use the high-speed network. The town, in turn, remits the dues to Cal State Monterey Bay. In all, the university will receive $240,000 annually for providing the network.

In addition to helping the locals, the university's high bandwidth has been called upon to assist other maritime research projects.

Recently, for example, the Mystic Aquarium in Mystic, Conn., needed 10 megabytes of constant bit rate service to broadcast a compressed, full-motion research video, says Gonzales.

The city and Cat State gave the OK for the aquarium to piggyback on the network, allowing the maritime research facility to push the rich media project through the network at a low cost.