State Education Networks

There are increasing demands on state education networks to provide more enterprise applications and services, including course management systems, video-on-demand content repositories, disaster recovery, and shared high performance computing GRIDS. Beyond the sizable economies of scale and efficiencies to be gained by constituent members, what are the benefits to our community? The panelists will discuss initiatives underway in their states and will describe some of the challenges, strategies and implementation issues to consider when contemplating centrally hosting enterprise applications and resources within your StateNet.

Starting and maintaining a new service offering is a significant undertaking that requires resources and time. Some services are tied directly to the network and local resources; these must be developed and run by the local state network. Others are not and can be shared by multiple state networks. Panelists will discuss how StateNets may offer services to other state networks, whereby recipients can then offer the service to their community as if it were their own.

What are you doing to meet the exponential growth of network traffic? Are you moving from gigabit to 10-gigabit capacity on the backbone? Are you successfully increasing capacity to university and public education endpoints to gigabit or greater? Is your approach to increase capacity with network-owned fiber or to contract with telcos, or a combination of both? Panelists will share their experiences with and ideas about how a state education network can meet the growing bandwidth demands of their customers.

How important is videoconferencing to the member education organizations you support? Is fully interactive videoconferencing an important service you provide, or is it being replaced by other services such as asynchronous tools like course management systems or web conferencing? What support services do you provide, such as managing a video operations support center, scheduling, and so forth?

This panel will discuss the interrelation between state networks and health care networks. In particular, the discussion will focus on the various community perspectives of the FCC-funded (Universal Service Fund) rural health care initiative and how we can work together as a community to educate the FCC on the role of regional and state networks.

What Collaborative Services is your statewide community currently using and planning to use in the future? Will these services be centrally provisioned, managed, and maintained? Which of these services will be (or are) integrated with each other and with your existing managed services platforms? How did you accomplish this integration, or how do you plan to approach it? How far along are you with Web2.0 applications? Are these tools being shared across the entire K-20 continuum? Why or why not? What role(s) does SIP play in your institutions' learning applications?

This presentation is an overview of the Massachusetts HIgher Education Network - "MITI:" Massachusetts Information Turnpike Initiative.

Regional and state networks increasingly take a leadership role in providing last-mile networking access essential for cutting-edge scholarship and research. Collaboration and peering among these networks has proven beneficial (for now), but what will be the long-term impact for our national networking needs, and how will it help America compete with Europe and Asia? Speakers will share their insights on the future of regional networks, including what they perceive as their unique technical and policy challenges, and what their role will be in meeting America’s future networking needs.