Northern Ireland Regional Area Network

A high speed learning solution

When growing demand caused an infrastructure crucial to education in Northern Ireland to begin to creak under pressure, it was clear that a more robust solution had to be developed.

The Northern Ireland Regional Area Network (NIRAN) is the body in charge of managing the network for the tertiary education sector in Northern Ireland. What it needed was to find a value for money method of connecting member institutions, whilst providing them with sufficient bandwidth to access vital educational facilities.

Our specialist consultants developed a high speed regional network using a resilient form of Ethernet connectivity. This bespoke network enables NIRAN to meet the high capacity requirements of Northern Ireland’s educational institutions, no matter how remote their location.

Linking a region & connecting its students

Set up by local, higher and further education institutions, NIRAN was created to give the Northern Ireland tertiary education sector the high quality bandwidth it needs to access important educational materials. An essential aspect of students’ studies is the teaching, learning and research content available via the JANET network – the network that connects all higher and further education institutions – and more recently schools – in the UK. Our solution enables

NIRAN to make this material easily accessible to every student across the region.

Identifying requirements, meeting needs

With demand for online services at an all time high, 50% of the region’s further education colleges were saturating their available bandwidth every day. The colleges’ IT managers were spending time and effort identifying services needing

the most bandwidth, and limiting usage to other learning resources to prioritise preferred services. The students’ online learning experience was beginning to suffer due to the network congestion.

What NIRAN needed was a high speed regional network – the same as provided in other regions across the UK, so they carried out a survey to discover the connectivity requirements of each institution. With bandwidth levels confirmed, our consultants developed a solution to achieve this and provide NIRAN’s new network.

An advanced approach for a reliable service

Working in partnership with NIRAN, our specialists developed an innovative Metro Ethernet VPN solution connecting multiple sites. This advanced approach allowed us to keep costs down, yet, by installing a second Point of Presence (PoP) in Derry, we were able to route circuits right across Northern Ireland. “The ntl:Telewest Business proposal is technically sound and represents good value for money,” Brian Doran, Technical Director of NIRAN comments. “This is

an innovative use of technology and gives us the increased bandwidth we want while keeping within our budget.”

As we already supplied most of the Belfast area with the links that manage bandwidth for Northern Ireland’s civil service, our network in the region was well established. This existing infrastructure enabled our consultants to implement a reliable and fully backed-up service, delivering network reliability right across Northern Ireland.

Meeting students’ needs with a future-proof solution

A total of 26 sites are linked on our network, including 16 further education colleges and the region’s major universities. There’s also potential for other public sector organisations, schools and educational enterprises to be connected in the

future. Chris Kelly, the NIRAN Coordinator, was happy with the installation, “The ntl:Telewest Business team has been very helpful during the implementation process. They’ve listened to our technical requirements and shown flexibility.”

In many cases, upgrading from 2Mb to 34 or 100Mb circuits has given students vastly improved access to their course materials and the Internet. Thanks to our solution in Northern Ireland, the JANET network now covers every part of the UK.

The speed of the network created by our solid infrastructure has also encouraged a greater take-up of valuable educational services and online learning materials – both from the colleges themselves and from national bodies like the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). There is little risk of reaching capacity as the network has been designed with future-proofing in mind, with ample bandwidth delivered to each institution to enable effective operation – both now and for some years to come.

What it has made possible

“The new network provides a boost to the whole of the tertiary education sector in Northern Ireland,” comments Nigel Macartney, Chair of NIRAN. “This cost-effective, scalable solution will help us to develop a new generation of education resources and services, such as multimedia streaming and video conferencing to enhance learning, training and collaborative research.”

And to prove Nigel’s point, there are already a whole host of activities going on within Northern Ireland’s colleges and universities that are only made possible due to the new high speed bandwidth. One institution has significantly reduced

operational administration with a web-based management system, and another finds that the extra capacity enables its teacher training course to participate more fully in e-learning. Michael Kane, IT Manager at East Antrim Institute of Further and Higher Education sums up, “The network performance is very impressive – the introduction of NIRAN has given students and staff a faster, more enjoyable online experience.”