The New Kent Community Network

Management Summary, November 2004

Internet use is growing rapidly in primary, special and secondary schools and the Kent Education & Libraries Strategic Plan required a new, innovative, high capacity network. As the map shows, the KCN can connect schools in every part of the County to broadband.

Kent Community Network Design

The competition winner, Unisys, has designed a completely new, optical fibre network:

• 10 Mbps symmetric bandwidth to all secondary schools with 100 Mbps available.
• Resilient Internet access and connection to the National Educational Network.
• Hubs located in BT exchanges, giving round the clock maintenance access.
• Switched Ethernet network for high quality of service and content delivery.

The core network is based on 1000 Mbps optical fibre circuits, which provide over 50 times the current bandwidth. The ‘backbone’ comprises six resilient rings, providing multiple paths in case of a broken fibre link. Cisco switches ensure high performance for real-time applications, such as video, voice, streaming media and learning platforms.

Implications for Secondary and Middle Schools

Secondary schools can change to 2Mbps bandwidth at the current £6k pa contribution or 10 Mbps at £10k pa. The table below shows the school contribution levels and reductions for hosting links to local schools. The considerable costs of installing fibre-optic cable are being met by the DfES grant plus additional investment by Kent Education & Libraries.

The backbone network will be installed by March 2005 when school installations begin. Secondaries need to transfer by June 2005 when the Learning Stream contracts terminate.

As good security is essential to protect pupils and networks, schools will need to sign the new security policy and their networks pass a security audit before connection to the new network. It is a DfES requirement that school networks are designed to the new national standards.

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