BCNETwork News

December 2007

BC's Students Wired for High-Speed

Facebook, You Tube, Web CT, iTunes U, Skype, blogging, podcasting and social bookmarking......sound familiar? These are just some of the current collaborative and social networking tools BC’s students are tapped into and connected to 24/7, through the Internet Technology infrastructures offered by BC’s higher-education institutes.

BCNET’s network metrics shows that the current Internet usage at its member universities (provided through BCNET) in 2006/2007 is a sustained average of 1.2 gigabytes/second. We believe that this ranks BCNET as the largest corporate/enterprise Internet user in the province of BC.

This sustained Internet load at BC’s higher education institutes reflects high Internet use by students, researchers and academics across BC. The current Internet load indicates that students across BC are using the Internet 24/7 and that having access to high-speed networks is important.

With the advent of next generation collaborative technologies and social networking, students today have so much more at their fingertips than students several years ago. It all comes down to speed and performance - faster and always available.

Higher education institutes in BC are now able to provide students with leading-edge internetworking technologies to assist them in their education and research goals, as well as fulfill their social networking needs that have become a norm for communication among friends, colleagues and even instructors.

Compared to other students in Canada, BC’s students are among the most connected and wired. Students who live on campus now have unprecedented bandwidth capacity and speed that makes yesterday’s Internet pale in comparison. The time it takes to download a song, Skype a friend or search for an online research article has been reduced to mere seconds with BCNET’s internetworking connectivity. This internet connectivity is expected by BC’s higher education students.

Students today are much more tech savvy then a generation ago and when the decision to select a university to attend is made, students are not only researching the facilities, professors and researchers at the university, but also the Internet services and networking technologies that are available on campus.

Through BCNET, students have access to world-class internetworking and collaborative technologies giving them the competitive advantage in achieving their goals. One can only imagine what the connections of the future have in store for the next generation of students in BC.