Room to grow: ntl helps City College Manchester build its future

 

City College Manchester is the largest college in Manchester, and one of the leading centres for Further Education in the North of England. With more than 500 courses, the College offers one of the widest choices of vocational and academic subjects in the UK.

 

The College is also the largest single provider of prison education, with 22 prison education contracts across the country. City College Manchester has more than 1000 staff, situated at campuses across the city, and 28,000 students wanting to access college facilities from unlimited locations.

 

As a forward-thinking educational establishment, City College Manchester is keen to provide up-to-the-minute facilities for its students and staff. The College caters to students who require a more flexible approach to learning that combines online education with traditional teaching methods. Consequently, the College needs to attract these types of students by offering a leading-edge learning environment that can reach out to them - wherever and whenever they are available.

 

With this goal in mind, the College developed a strategy to deliver services and education online. They needed to provide online registration, virtual learning environments, and tools such as video conferencing, which would enable multiple sites to participate in learning at the same time. The College also wanted to provide staff with online access to all of its information systems. And for maximum efficiency, they needed these facilities to be integrated.

 

But by 2002, City College Manchester found their network was letting them down. With 2 Mbps streams connecting the campuses, the College was struggling with severe bottlenecks between sites. Lack of bandwidth meant the College couldn’t run the online applications they needed, and the online applications that were operating ran far too slowly. Peak access times crippled the network and, as the College’s Network Manager, John Goulden notes, “the College had no room to grow.”

 

If City College Manchester was to reach its goal of delivering online services and education effectively, it needed a reliable, first-class network that was easy to manage, would offer flexibility, and would deliver return on investment.

 

City College Manchester considered a number of solutions, including buying their own connections, using microwave technology, Frame Relay services and ATM. The solution they chose was ntl’s Ethernet VPN.

 

The ntl Ethernet VPN gives the College 100 Mbps Ethernet connections between their sites, and Gigabit Ethernet backbones to support each campus. With ntl managing the network end-to-end between the sites, it all adds up to an easy-to-manage network that allows the College to provide the services its students need. ntl’s Ethernet VPN also delivers:

 

Unbeatable value

With a competitive price for services that are superior to alternative solutions, ntl offered more for the College’s money. The tailored Ethernet VPN is providing City College Manchester with cost savings and increased productivity, while enabling them to provide the facilities required by staff and students - not just now, but in the future.

 

Increased revenue

ntl’s Ethernet VPN has not only made a significant improvement in the College’s communications, it has also enabled new ways of working. Paul Ricketts, Vice Principal of City College Manchester, explains: “Thanks to the capabilities provided by ntl’s Ethernet VPN, the College is able to support new education projects across Manchester and beyond, which will generate significant increases in revenue.”

 

Flexibility for the future

ntl’s Ethernet VPN solution gives City College Manchester the flexibility to upgrade incrementally. The College has the freedom to choose upgrade options that suit them, upgrading in 100 Mbps increments. The Ethernet VPN is also enabling the College to create - and grow - separate network areas for staff and students.

 

The solution’s flexibility gives the College the ability to evolve as required, without being constrained by technology. As Goulden notes, “it will allow us to grow.” And in an environment where organisations of all types must ‘grow or die’, there can be no better assurance for the future.

 

Human resources

The College has found that ntl’s engineers are extremely adaptable and easy to work with. Goulden notes, “The people I deal with at ntl are professional, courteous and responsive. What more can I say?”

 

Increased security and efficiency

Before the College upgraded its network with ntl’s Ethernet VPN solution, the data backup procedure for disaster recovery involved making backups on tape overnight and physically moving those tapes to other locations during the following day.

Now data backup occurs automatically, and the College data is more secure because it is electronically transferred offsite overnight.

 

Reliability

Reliability is critical for a college aiming to deliver its core service - education - online. The Ethernet VPN has increased the College’s network reliability tremendously. Before the upgrade, the College had one central point of failure in the network. Now,with a managed multipoint connection on each site, if one site fails, the rest can still communicate.

 

Thanks to ntl’s Ethernet VPN, the College’s online student registration, financial system, and virtual learning environment are up and running. Indeed, the College is about to upgrade the virtual learning environment. They are now in a position to integrate their online applications. And they are extending 100 Mbps connections to the desktop.

 

As a result of ntl’s performance on this data project, City College Manchester awarded them the contract for the College’s voice services, too. The network Service Level Agreement offered by ntl has enabled the College to converge their voice and data networks, thus realising further cost savings and network efficiencies. Thanks to the network convergence, the College has halved the number of its 2 Mbps streams - the savings it makes on line rentals, alone, is significant. In addition, the switched Ethernet infrastructure of the Ethernet VPN solution has enabled City College Manchester to implement Voice over IP, which delivers functionality that helps the College operate more efficiently.

 

Ultimately, ntl have enabled City College Manchester to be the kind of college they want to be - the kind of college they need to be to provide quality education and facilities to students, and a productive working environment for staff. Goulden sums it up best: “City College Manchester had a vision of what, where, and who it wanted to be. ntl has helped us to turn that vision into reality.