You Decide Lan Upgrade

“You Decide”: The Charter School LAN Upgrade

Leonard Cooper Charter School expanded its facilities two years ago but due to poor LAN planning the facilities need to be upgraded to accommodate the increasing need of the workload. The new wing installed uses twisted pair copper wire but connects currently using hubs non-intelligent network devices.

A series of interviews revealed the needs of the LAN but also its limitations, hence the proposed upgrades are taken from the needs. There are four interviews from the IT director, Network Technician, Principal, and the HVAC Technician.

Alfred Wingfield is the IT Director whose interview yielded the biggest concern of the LAN and required the priority of the proposed fix. Alfred states the following concerns: *needs an updated cable infrastructure that would enable VOIP, and that the backbone switches would be connected via a high-speed connection. Currently the old backbone wing switch and the new wing backbone switch are over 120 meters apart and use twisted pair copper wire, which causes bottleneck. The two switches should be connected using fiber optic cabling. With the increased bandwidth VOIP can be implemented without causing additional adding to the congestion, capacity can be realized at over 1GB transmission rate at Full Duplex. The 120M distance no longer becomes an concern because fiber optic has the lowest attenuation of any media including twisted pair copper wire that is currently being used.

Helen Ross the Network Technician revealed her concerns during her interview as the following:

*Too many collisions on the network, currently there is not an efficient way to manage print jobs, as there are 50-networked printers. The collision issues on the LAN involve the staff accessing emails, checking attendance, and printing. The main cause for congestion on the LAN are the 50 printers; installing a print server will allow management of the printer queue, in order to connect the printers to the print...