Hello,
I'm a student and working on a case study that reuires me to set up a WAN network for u university. They already have a connection via an ADSL but need new better connection.
Please which of the WAN technologies is best to use in this instance? Keeping in mind the kind of traffic that a university network will get.
Thanks guys..
Bibi
You will probably only achieve a better connection if the University can be supplied a Cable Connection. (Fibre Optic) Whatever 'speed' your current Internet Service Provider (ISP) is offering will depend on how far away from the Telephone Exchange the University is, and the architecture available to the ISP at that Exchange.
For example, in the UK here ADSL can be advertised as "up to" 24Mbps or higher. But, depending an how far away from the Exchange the User is, they may never get anything higher than 2Mbps. The expression "up to" is the ISP's caveat.
So, just changing to another ADSL ISP for performance reasons may not improve anything. Is Cable available to your University? This news looks promising, can your University take advantage of this?
The WAN connection that is available to your University depends on many factors. Your best bet is to contact the various communication providers that service the area. You cant always go by bandwidth vs price. You'll find that some connections with less bandwidth may be more expensive. The key here is the Service Level Agreement (SLA). Its basically the guarantee for what you are paying for. For a University, I would assume that they would be willing to engage with an ISP and pay for something a bit more than a consumer based ADSL connection.
You should be looking for a type of WAN connection that will be guaranteed to be up and available, lots of up/down bandwidth, and a collection of public IPs so that you can host various services on the Internet.
BigPaw,yes the new connection is allowed to be cabled, im just to identify a new better connection and give some technical differences between the new connection and the existing ADSL. I am actually to use something other than ADSL. Thanks.
JorgeM, thanks for the repsonse, yes i am to assume that the University is willing to pay for more.
I dont know much about WAN and at the risk of showing the next to nothing i know about it, i was wondering if Circuit switching,Packet switching,Point to Point, ATM etc are types of WAN techs that are not obsolete and still being used?
Is the ATM a more reliable connection to use?
Bigpaw, ok, i will look into Fibre Optic as an option. Thank you...
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