A £5.5m upgrade to the North East’s high-bandwidth education network will improve security and ensure there is no single point of failure, according to the region’s broadband consortium.
The next-generation network, providing the area’s 65 secondary, 495 primary schools and eight local authorities with connections of up to 100Mbit/s, will be fully rolled out by the beginning of next year.
The existing network offers the same connection speeds but could be vulnerable, says Mel Philipson, manager of Northern Grid for Learning (NGfL), which runs the service.
‘We are creating a huge mesh network, which will have multiple interconnections so that even if one point fails it can automatically click over and re-route traffic to an alternative pathway,’ said Philipson.
‘The local authorities and schools in the area have reached the point where they recognise that having broadband is mission critical and it is unthinkable for it to go down,’ she said.
The new network will also contain enhanced security measures to provide additional protection against hacking and denial of service attacks.
The NGfL was originally set up in 2003 to meet the government target for all schools to have broadband access by 2005. The mesh network, to be provided by supplier EasyNet, is the fourth phase of the scheme.
A central benefit of the programme is the cost. By aggregating education sector demand, schools can pay as little as £14,000 per year for a 100Mbit/s connection, a fraction of commercial rates.
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