Telecommunications

Wayne State College offers a number of telecommunication services divided into two basic categories: Telephony and Wide Area Network Connectivity

Telephony
WSC maintains an internal hybrid Private Branch eXchange (PBX) utilizing both the Local Area Network (Voice over IP) and traditional analog telephony delivery to provide phone service for offices, dorm rooms and emergency facilities for the entire campus. The PBX provides basic telephone services as well as advanced features including voice-mail, call forwarding, caller-id, E911 location and call conference bridge functionality. Inbound and outbound calls are routed over several fault tolerant redundant PRI facilities. The core phone system is protected by battery backup and can run for over 24 hours in the event of a campus power failure.

Wide Area Network Connectivity
WSC uses an Ethernet connection running over a DS3 circuit to provide 25 Mbps of both Internet and Internet 2 bandwidth to the campus community. WSC partners with Network Nebraska for Internet connectivity, a statewide effort to aggregate bandwidth and purchasing power for the benefit of any and all tax supported entities in the State. As is the case with all public and private entities in rural America this bandwidth is a precious resource and as such Network and Technology Services takes several measures to ensure that our internet service is highly available for essential campus functions.

All internet traffic is routed through a firewall system running on the Linux operating system and including modules specifically designed and written by WSC staff members to allow the greatest degree of freedom in the academic and dormitory networks while protecting the campus investment in bandwidth.

Traffic entering and leaving campus is prioritized by protocol (or application) to ensure that essential campus functions (teaching, learning, administration, etc) are never impeded by other internet activities. WSC maintains a local web proxy server to further accelerate web browsing performance on campus. Peer to peer applications (music and movie sharing, etc) are monitored and throttled for both the dormitory and academic network both for bandwidth consumption and intellectual property policy reasons.

In addition to more traditional internet applications like web browsing and e-mail transfer WSC utilizes this internet bandwidth to provide synchronous video conference services both to the academic and administrative communities on campus. Video conferences are held both over the primary Internet connection and a dedicated T1 IP connection into the Nebraska Video Conferencing Network.

Residential campuses like Wayne State are presented with unique challenges in terms of bandwidth management as peak utilization often occurs in the evening after traditional peak hours for most entities. This provides WSC with an opportunity to fulfill its mission as a regional partner by providing very low cost bandwidth to other tax supported entities in the region. This bandwidth would otherwise be wasted as the capacity needed by dormitory residents in the evening hours is very rarely approached during the day and better utilizes taxpayer dollars expended for a relatively expensive and critical resource.