The Washington School District currently consists of 33 schools, all of
which are to be linked together in a wide area network (WAN). Throughout
the
district are three regional WAN hubs, each of which are to service 11 schools. These hubs will be the center of WAN connectivity, and will perform routing
functions around the WAN by using high end, powerful routers with numerous serial interfaces. Essentially, these routers are in charge of three distinct tasks; routing
among school local area networks (LANs), routing among regional hubs,
and routing from the district WAN to the global Internet.
The wiring for each individual school LAN has been separately planned by various groups, so that is outside the scope of this report. Rather, this report
picks up where an individual school LAN ends; at the router. The Washington School District has requested that connections from the schools to the regional hubs
be T1 data lines. For this, the District can lease the T1 lines from a telecommunications service provider, such as AT&T or Qwest. One T1 line is to be leased for
each school, with each line going from a school site to the district
hub which will service it.
T1 lines have also been requested to interconnect the hubs. The three hubs are to be fully meshed together, so that each hub has a point-to-point link to
every other hub. As with the connections from the hubs to the schools, T1 services will be leased from a service provider. These lines, like the lines that connect
from regional hubs to the schools, cost $565 per month if purchased
from Qwest.
Finally, the District must connect to the global Internet. This connection will be handled at the District Office Data Center, one of the three aforementioned
regional hubs. Like all other connections, this will run on a T1 line. Unlike others, it will utilize Frame Relay as its data link layer encapsulation. Qwest has stated
that they can provide the T1 service for $565 per month.