Case Study

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Networking and Collaboration Keep the Aggies in the Game

Industry Focus

Teaching and research university

Size

46,000 students, an annual research budget of more than $500 million and a $4.4 billion endowment

Networking Solution

A fast, reliable network provides the bandwidth needed for collaborative activities, including digital voice, data and video conferencing applications

Business Value

Greater ability to attract top students professors and research grants

About Our Customer

Texas A&M University – home of the "Aggies" – is one of America's premiere teaching and research institutions. It was ranked among the top 20 public universities by U.S. News & World Report and is one of only a few academic institutions to hold federal triple designation as a Land-Grant, Sea-Grant and Space-Grant university. The school has awarded more than 320,000 degrees, including more than 70,000 at the graduate and professional level. Its faculty and staff have created more than 350 inventions and new processes that have led to 125 patents. Its colleges of agriculture, architecture, business, engineering, geosciences, liberal arts and veterinary medicine are among the largest in the U.S.

Situation

Competition among top schools for the best students, professors and research projects is fierce. Reputation must be backed by performance, and increasingly, performance is built on collaboration among students, teachers and researchers – including researchers at other universities. The need for communication – be it via audio, video or web conferencing – extends far beyond the 5200-acre main campus to its branch locations widely dispersed throughout Texas, to international locations in Mexico and Qatar, as well as to other schools. Enriching the curriculum by tapping into resources from around the globe and meeting the distance learning needs of remote students all require the support of a robust network that provides ample bandwidth and rock-solid reliability.

Solution

High-speed fiber optic broadband metropolitan area network (MAN) connections tie the Aggies' remote sites to the Lonestar Education and Research (LEARN) network, a private broadband network that serves Texas educators and researchers as a collaboration superhighway. AT&T GigaMAN® dedicated fiber optic connections and Customized Switched Metro Ethernet (CSME) services provide fast, reliable last mile access to the network and to the main campus. These enable students to take advantage of remote learning opportunities, help professors enrich course content and allow researchers to partner with peers from other institutions and compete for grant dollars.

Networking to Collaborate – and Compete

Universities have always been places where great minds gathered to study, teach and learn. Though much has changed in higher education, networking and collaboration are more important than ever for bringing people and ideas together. Opportunities exist to both compete with rival institutions and to work closely with them.

Leading institutions like Texas A&M compete vigorously to attract the brightest students, the most accomplished professors and the most challenging research projects. A host of factors, from academic performance to curriculum design to the success of the football program, determines who wins. A key factor is the quality of the school facilities: the campus, the library, and everything available to help students to study, teachers to teach, and researchers to investigate.

At Texas A&M, one competitive advantage is the communications network overseen by Dr. Walt Magnussen, Ph.D, Director of Telecommunications. The networking challenge is significant. Texas A&M has more than 44,000 students at its 5200-acre main campus in College Station, Texas, and thousands more in branch campuses as far away as Qatar in the Persian Gulf. The university also manages communications for seven state agencies with more than 200 branch offices across the state.

Texas is well known as a place of wide open spaces and big ideas, so it's not surprising that Texas A&M and the state agencies have worked creatively to span the distances that separate cities, schools, agencies and people. "I don't think we can really call it 'thinking out of the box,'" Magnussen says, "because with the universities I am not sure there even is a box."

One box-free idea is Texas A&M's intensive use of the network to deliver all kinds of content, whether it's up- and downloading information, delivering courses via streaming media or video conferencing. On campus or off, students benefit from enriched access to professors and subject experts from across the globe. Off-campus students can tap into live presentations or access streaming content, regardless of their location. Researchers use the network to assemble multidisciplinary teams capable of winning complex research projects.

"The A&M system was one of the first to get very heavily involved with videoconferencing," said Magnussen. "We have between 400 and 500 video conference systems scattered across the state. We also have a significant investment in voice over IP (VoIP), and other IP based collaboration tools.

Bringing People and Ideas Together

These robust network connections are helping shrink distance and place as barriers to work and learning. "We use the network to make communication and collaboration as seamless as possible, so that hopefully we don't even see the difference between 'on campus' and 'off campus,'" said Magnussen. "We've got classes that are taught across the state from one campus to another, we use it extensively for administrative meetings, and also for research collaboration."

Extensive interaction among students and professors is especially important in doctoral-level courses. Magnussen recalled how the network helped candidates as he studied recently for his Ph.D. "There was a person in the program attending from St. Philip's College in San Antonio. Another was attending from Southwest State University, and a third attending from West Texas A&M. You're probably looking at a total of about 1200 to 1500 miles separation if they had to go to class on campus. These students would not have had an opportunity to do doctoral level work at a major research institution if the network were not enabled."

Collaboration is also important on the global stage. In every program, globalization is the reality. Magnussen pointed out that petroleum processes differ in the Middle East, yet "it is almost assured that if you are going to be a petroleum engineer, you are going to be working outside of our hemisphere some time in your career." To bring such global perspectives into the classroom, the network is an ideal tool.

Magnussen has used video conferencing in a telecommunications class that he teaches to connect his Texas students with the school's branch campus in Qatar. It was an opportunity for outreach that would never exist without the network. "In the blink of an eye we were able to have an engineer on the other side of the world do a one-hour guest lecture to my international telecom class. Being able to talk to somebody that's actually working in another hemisphere, in a completely different social environment, is something that can't be duplicated by reading a text book."

Rivals Play for the Same Team

In addition to opening the virtual door for distant students and lecturers, the Aggies' robust network pays dividends in the competition for research dollars. "If you look at any corporation, you have got to have certain capabilities to be competitive. Research universities are in the same boat," Magnussen said. "In the TAMU Internet2 Technology Evaluation Center (ITEC), a research center that I also direct, all of the research projects that we are doing would not have been possible were it not for the network that we have in play.

"We have a proposal in right now to one of the federal agencies," he added. "The capabilities they were looking for really didn't exist in one university, so by relying on the network we were able to put together a response team. I think we will get a positive response on the proposal but the only way that can happen is by getting partners at the very institutions that have the expertise we are looking for. If the network wasn't there, that wouldn't be possible."

In one such initiative, Texas A&M is collaborating with Columbia University and the University of Virginia to develop next-generation 911 emergency location services for a world of wireless and Internet-based communications. "We're doing a project that's spread across three universities and two time zones in three different departments. The idea we've all talked about, the virtual workplace, is starting to exist," Magnussen said. "It doesn't matter where I am."

By bringing schools and researchers together, the network enables them to both cooperate and compete at the same time. Magnussen sees such collaboration as a 'win-win' for his school. "One area where we have been able to surpass most other institutions," he said, "is in putting together a team of otherwise competing universities to work together towards a common goal and just put all of the differences behind us. What's good for both of us is just as good for us individually."

The Aggies put that principle to work when they team up with their cross-state rivals, the Longhorns of the University of Texas. "We have done a lot of major network initiatives with the University of Texas at Austin," Magnussen said. "And while we're a very unlikely pair – we are rivals in football, we are rivals competing for students – by working together networking-wise, we were able to build a much more robust system. Both of our institutions are provided with more capabilities at a better cost than would be possible individually."

New Things Are Now Possible

As a telecommunications industry veteran, Magnussen appreciates the continuing gains he has seen in data and signal processing and broadband communications. "The 911 project we are doing today, an application that involves a significant amount of collaboration, would not have been possible seven or eight years ago," he said. "Network reliability has increased, the quality of the audio and video encoding has increased. Frankly, back then lines were congested. We were trying to put more information on the lines than they could really handle.

"With new services becoming more prevalent, like CSME, GigaMAN® and OPT-E-MAN®, AT&T is offering bandwidth very reliably and cost effectively," Magnussen continued. "New things that we wished we could have done five years ago are now possible."

A dedicated AT&T account team turns on a dime to keep the Aggies in touch, wherever their missions of education, research and public service may lead. "When it comes to doing things out of the ordinary the account team for AT&T is just fantastic," Magnussen said. "That's really important when you your needs range from small research offices with two people in a small town out in rural Texas, to a major research university with thousands of students in a major city. Regardless of how large or small it is, the team has been able to get a solution in place that's just worked for us."

Voice of the Customer

"We use the network to make communication and collaboration as seamless as possible, so that hopefully we don't even see the difference between 'on campus' and 'off campus.'"

– Walt Magnussen, PhD, Texas A&M Director of Telecommunications