Collaboration and Dark Fiber

The Balboa Park Online Collaborative (BPOC) was created to lead technology-focused cooperation between 20 Balboa Park institutions. One of the challenges BPOC quickly uncovered when it began, was a serious limitation to supporting collaboration caused by the lack of IT infrastructure necessary to network the institutions together. As a result, BPOC has installed the infrastructure necessary for a high speed (1GB/second) connection between the organizations, to provide a 100mb internet connection and also to provide a connection to CalREN, the California Research and Education Network to which the vast majority of the state's K-20 educational institutions are connected.  The connection to CalREN also provides connectivity to non-California institutions and industry research organizations such as Internet2, high-speed networks in Mexico and the Association of Pacific Rim Universities Networks.

This mini workshop will explore the technology options as they relate to Wide Area Networks (WAN’s), the technical, civil engineering and political challenges that the different options create, a planning checklist for dealing with the challenges as well the reasons that multiple institutions might desire collaborate on a WAN.  All of this info will then be reviewed in the context of the Balboa Park WAN Project deployment as well as other museum WAN deployments with failures and successes highlighted.