City University London

Evolving learning, ensuring delivery

Established more than 100 years ago, City University London was founded in 1894 as the Northampton Institute and awarded full university status in 1966. The University attracts over 23,000 students from 156 countries, while teaching staff are drawn from nearly 50 international locations, ensuring that the University has a truly international outlook.

City University London is a principal provider of undergraduate, postgraduate, professional and vocational education in the United Kingdom. The University is committed to leading London in education, research and knowledge transfer for businesses and the professions and is renowned for its international focus and the employability of its graduates.

The University teaches across a range of subjects in arts including journalism and music, informatics, social sciences, engineering and mathematical sciences, business, law, health and community sciences.

Integral to the University’s continued success is the uninterrupted provision of high quality, resilient IT resources to its staff and students. ntl:Telewest Business’ Metro Ethernet VPN solution is helping City University London retain its high academic standing by providing a reliable, scaleable IT network across its 14 London sites.

Setting the standard

Despite the varied means of gaining degrees or comparative qualifications from non-universities, the number of students entering higher education continues to rise. In the fiercely competitive marketplace that this is creating anytime, anywhere access to the highest quality IT and educational resources is a prerequisite when students are considering their choice of provider – and if it is not delivered these students simply look elsewhere.

A highly resilient and fully managed data network provided by ntl:Telewest Business is enabling City University London to offer such modern-day educational support to its students, and ensure it competes effectively in the battle to attract the strongest applicants.

Facing the future

As with many other long-established multi-site organisations, City University London previously operated a non-strategic, multi-vendor point-to-point network. Over time this had evolved in an ad hoc manner to become a series of Local Area Networks (LANs) run by different providers servicing the University’s remote sites, as opposed to one cohesive network connecting all its individual buildings, students and staff.

Carl Stokes, Director of IT Operations and Infrastructure at City University London, explains, "Due to the multi-vendor LAN set-up, remote buildings operated as separate entities, which made them vulnerable to loss of service when incidents happened, such as cables being cut by utility providers, or when there were local connectivity issues due to IT outages."

City University London therefore decided to implement a campus-wide, single vendor solution that would support both its current and future needs.

Searching for a solution

An evaluation of short-listed providers followed, with individual solutions assessed against key criteria including value, flexibility and resilience. ntl:Telewest Business’ Metro Ethernet VPN solution was chosen, and a five year deal was signed.

By selecting ntl:Telewest Business, City University London was able to drastically reduce the procurement timeframe from six months to just three weeks. Alberto Stec, Account Manager, ntl:Telewest Business, explains, "Fortunately ntl:Telewest Business is a pre-approved supplier to the Office of Government Commerce. This meant that City University London avoided the need to go through a full, lengthy European tender and procurement cycle, saving considerable time and costs."

The benefits

With the new data solution in place, City University London now has a cost-effective, resilient and secure Wide Area Network (WAN). In addition, because it is also a fully managed service with predictable, predetermined future upgrade costs, the University can easily plan in advance for its IT requirements.

Availability and connectivity concerns are also now eliminated thanks to Class of Service (CoS), which provides effective bandwidth management. This is particularly useful when multiple applications are provisioned over a single network, and is proving to be very successful for the University.

As Carl explains: "Bandwidth now ranges from 10Mbps to 1Gbps, and network traffic is prioritised to avoid congestion. This guarantees delivery of our mission-critical services and applications, and downgrades less important traffic such as personal email account data."

Communication with remote university sites has also improved. Carl continues: "The remote buildings now operate as though they are on the main campus. This is extremely important, as some of our schools have staff based at different sites. The ability to stream video in a particular network segment, to ensure simultaneous multi-site teaching, for example, is very useful."

The new network also removes the risk of loss of service to these sites. For example, the University’s nursing schools are now no longer at the end of a single circuit. Instead, dual connection provides a failsafe, so there is no loss of service if there are any unexpected outages.

"We now have a truly future-proof solution that provides the resilient, scaleable network we need. It also lays the foundations for us to introduce new applications," concludes Carl.