Networking & Wireless

Washington's K-20 Ed Network Upgrades WAN

• By Leila Meyer
• 12/02/15

The K-20 Education Network, a publicly supported network supporting educational institutions in the state of Washington, is upgrading its wide area network (WAN) infrastructure to provide high speed communications to 101 higher education institutions, K-12 school districts and libraries.

The goal of the network upgrade was to ensure that K-20 could support the hundreds of data-intensive applications used by its member organizations for school administration, distance learning and operations. "As the largest education network in the state of Washington, we need to be able to connect thousands of students, multiple schools and several organizations together," said Mike Scroggins, deputy executive director of information technology for the State Board for Community and Technical Colleges and chair of the K-20 Network Consortium, in a prepared statement.

The WAN upgrade uses a fiber diverse, hub-and-spoke Ethernet virtual private line (EVPL) from Comcast Business. K-20's 101 member organizations are spoke locations that use Comcast Business's high availability Ethernet solutions platform to connect to K-20's hub at its main data center. K-20's network hub in Seattle uses two 100 gigabit (Gb) fiber circuits to supply the network with more than 200 Gb per second of data throughput. High bandwidth, dedicated connectivity for colleges and school districts ranges from 100 megabits per second (Mbps) to 10 Gbps per circuit.

According to information from Comcast Business, the solution provides K-20 with a high-availability, high-performance network that will let the organization "grow quickly and seamlessly as future network demands increase."