Gigabit to the Last Mile in Utah The Status of UEN’s Project to Provide GigE Connections to all Schools, Colleges and Universities in Utah

Key features of project  FY 2003 Strategic Plan- goal established to convert network to Ethernet capacity  Backbone is leased DWDM fiber, primarily from Qwest  Gigabit Ethernet connections to school and college with 100 mb/s to 1000 mb/s to all secondary schools, college and university campuses  locations from backbone are leased fiber from numerous private vendors, mostly local telephone companies

Key features of project  Financing is through a combination of state appropriations and federal E-Rate reimbursements  UEN pays vendor contracts for backbone and college and school connections  State average E-Rate discount is 65%  Since Higher Education circuits are not E- Rate eligible, UEN pays about 40% of total circuit charges with state funds

Status of project  Conversion of Backbone to DWDM Optical Lambda services was initiated in November 2003  Regional POP’s were moved to the new backbone during the spring and early summer of 2005.

Status of project  All higher education main campus locations (9), and 30 of 40 district offices were connected last year  50% of secondary school locations are now connected (150)  80 additional secondary schools are under contract for completion in next months

Status of Project  Contracts to complete remaining 65 schools are now being negotiated and state portion of funding finalized  UEN does not fund network connectivity of elementary schools  Several districts have used the UEN Ethernet project to provide Gigabit connections to elementary schools

Why is UEN pursuing this Project?  Growth of UEN network traffic: since 2000, traffic doubles every 18 months to 2 years  To keep up with growth, Internet capacity has expanded from 150 mb/s to 1.8 gigabits from 2001 to 2005  New applications will require dramatically greater network capacity ◊Several hundred IP-based administrative, student services, and academic applications must be available at all times ◊IP-based videoconferencing ◊Other applications