Schools’ backbone gets stronger
Sunday Business Post - Best Schools Supplement, published on March 13, 2011

Leslie Faughnan hears how HEAnet is enabling 21stcentury education in Ireland.

Established in 1984 by the seven major universities under the auspices of the Higher Education Authority (HEA), HEAnet is now one of the largest ISPs in Ireland, with close to a million individual users. Originally aimed at promoting and providing the infrastructure for the electronic interchange of information between third level institutions, HEAnet today serves the entire education system.That includes primary and post-primary schools, institutes of technology and research institutions. 

Successive investment in national fibre network links and international connectivity ensures the leading edge performance of the HEAnet network. It has two 2.5 gigabit links to the general Internet and two similar links to the important EU-support ed GEANT2 high-speed research network that serves European institutions. HEAnet is also directly connected through the North to Janet, its British counterpart. 

At schools level, the obvious headline is the 78 schools that are now connected at speeds of up to 100Mbs under a programme that got the green light in July 2009. The public procurement process for the third party contractors which installed the final legs of the connections to the chosen schools took some months. But overall the 78 schools were online at 100mbs within nine months of theMinister’s signature. 

‘‘The schools in the 100mbs project are spread across the country,’’ said Ronan Byrne, HEAnet chief technology officer. ‘‘The objective was to extend the reach across urban and rural locations and to learn from the roll-out so that the programme can be extended later. There is at least one school enabled in every county and all three of the island post-primary schools are connected.’’ 

The schools were selected on geographical and other criteria and in practice the size of their enrollment was the most influential factor in most cases.The majority of the participating schools are connected by traditional landline or licensed wireless links and a lucky 31 are on fibre, essentially those located in towns with a MAN (metropolitan area network). 

While the go-ahead decision by the incoming government is awaited, the 100Mbsps project is scheduled to enable a further tranche of 300 post primary schools this year and another 300 in 2012. This will take in the majority of the 730post primary schools in the country. There are 3,270 primary schools on basic broadband with no immediate national plans for upgrading. Secondary schools with primary schools attached or on the same campus are entitled to share their connectivity. 

As the network provider and ISP, the remit of HEAnet ends at the school router. ‘‘We offer the guaranteed connectivity and bandwidth and a range of added value network services,’’ Byrne said. 

‘‘We are leveraging our extensive experience at third level in both the engineering and the services. So, for example, this is essentially a national shared service rather than simple Internet access provision.’’

HEAnet actually manages the routers, he said. 

‘‘We will see an outage or other technical issues before the school does, for example. At the services level, we issue and manage the IP addresses and we run an overall web filtering service under a policy agreed with the Department of Education. The schools sign up individually for this and can then set or change their local rules. Some won’t allow Facebook or YouTube, for example. Others will set and enforce conditions for their use on the school system.’’ 

Not surprisingly, the 100Mbps capacity is still much greater than actual traffic. ‘‘Audiovisual content is clearly the driver on the internet generally and in education it is certainly being used more and more as a teaching and learning resource,’’ said Byrne. 

‘‘We think we’ll see live videoconferencing becoming much more widespread, in sharing teaching resources between schools and colleges, for example.’’ 

There was also, said Byrne, the ever-widening range of digital content published by the National Centre for Technology in Education (NCTE), such as Immerse (Innovative Multi-Media Educational Resources for Students and Educators) . Other resources include Ordnance Survey maps through Scoilnet, Image-Bank with thousands of educationally useful photos and other projects in specialist subject areas such as science and geography. 

HEAnet also offers hosting services for schools for interactive websites, with smart added functionality such as single sign-on for access anywhere, any time by authorised users. The physical infrastructure for the schools network has been linked into the nearest regional third-level locations in many instances to leverage the lower costs of backhaul through the HEAnet nodes. 

‘‘We are also looking to the future linking of the schools and third-level ecosystems at the content and interaction level,’’ Byrne said, ‘‘again with the general idea of resource sharing and increased levels of collaboration. 

‘‘The entire education sector would then have seamless sharing of communications and resources across all users.’’

Ronan Byrne, chief technology officer, HEAnet