Rs.4-crore tie-up with BSNL
Thousands of students in Kerala will soon be able to scorch the asphalt on cyber autobahns, thanks to a Rs. 4-crore tie-up between the IT@School programme and Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) to put in place a Virtual Private Network (VPN) over broadband for public schools.
The VPN will be realised with a 100 Mbps leased lined connection supported by Multi Protocol Label Switching and with 20 Mbps bandwidth as its backbone. Seventy-five per cent of the project cost would be absorbed by the Union government under the ICT@School scheme. A specialty of the scheme is that BSNL is providing the VPN at one-fifth the market rates.
A memorandum of understanding between the government and BSNL was signed here on Tuesday at a press conference called by Education Minister P.K. Abdu Rabb.
Education Secretary Shiv Shankar said at a press conference that the VPN would be up and running in about a month. The State government has claimed that this would be the first-of-its-kind network in the country for educational institutions in a State.
The facility would be given to 2,495 high schools, 1,236 higher secondary schools, 377 vocational higher secondary schools and 233 upper primary schools. Close to 300 offices of the Education Department — the offices of Deputy Directors, District Educational Officers, and Assistant Educational Officers, District Institutes of Educational Technology, and 35 Block Resource Centres in Kerala — would also be part of the virtual network.
The high-speed transfer of virtually limited data over the VPN throws open the possibility of real-time, online, collaborative learning for these schools.
The VPN would also enable students to seamlessly access ICT-enabled learning content and operate in a much more efficient manner the School Wiki.
Administrative functions such as the dissemination of examination results, operations relating to the single window admission system for Plus One courses, and transfer and posting of teachers can be made more efficient and fast using the VPN.
Keywords: BSNL, Virtual Private Network, Kerala schools, School wiki, cyber autobahns
Dear Editor, the report says that 'The VPN will be realized with a 100 Mbps leased lined connection'. I think this is inaccurate. A single leased line of 100 Mbps capacity can support one school's bandwidth requirement. It will probably require thousands of such leased lines for a VPN of the scale described.
I'm also curious that the value-addition by the VPN cannot justified, even if it is given by BSNL at 1/5th the market cost. What is wrong if schools just use the public internet ? A lot of open courseware (eg. MIT), resources like Wikipedia (useful though imerfect), pronounciation help (eg. Mirriam Webster), translation (google), simulation sites (physics) etc are available on the public internet and unmatched by any private network !
The need of the hour is application interaction among schools and agencies. The money should have been well spent in that area, developing online collaboration servers and content (text, media) repositories, not on VPNs.
"The high-speed transfer of virtually limited data".. surely you mean virtually "unlimited" data.
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