Networkmaine, MDOE Upgrading 301 PreK-12 Schools to Gigabit Speeds
Pandemic exposes growing need to improve broadband connectivity for remote learning ORONO, MAINE (Dec. 30, 2020) – Networkmaine, a unit of the University of Maine System responsible for the design and operation of Maine’s research and education network (MaineREN) that delivers high-speed Internet and technology services to support education, research, public service, government and economic development throughout the state, announced today a partnership with the Maine Department of Education to upgrade network connections at preK-12 schools through the Maine School and Library Network (MSLN) project. Internet connections at an estimated 301 preK-12 schools have or will receive upgrades as part of the project. Follow this link for a coverage map of schools receiving upgrades. “COVID’s effects on our education systems in Maine and throughout the country are well-documented,”said Jeff Letourneau, executive director of Networkmaine. “Many schools in our state have been connected at 100 Mbps or lower as their previous use of the Internet didn’t demand any more than that amount.” In Maine schools remote and hybrid learning models are driving the need for additional bandwidth especially at the elementary level. In order to implement safety requirements that have proven to reduce the risk of transmission of COVID-19, many-school districts are using some form of hybrid learning where half of the student body is in the classroom and the other half participate remotely. “The heavy usage of video conferencing has dramatically increased bandwidth consumption at schools, necessitating the upgrades to gigabit speeds,” explained Letourneau. “Since early on in this pandemic student connectivity has been a top priority,” said Beth Lambert, Director of Innovative Teaching and Learning at the Maine Department of Education. “Maine’s teachers and administrators have been working tirelessly to adapt and, in many cases, learn new skills in order to teach their students during this disruption. I am proud that we are able to provide this upgrade and remove the barrier of limited bandwidth and allow educators to reach their students without interruption.” Through MaineREN, Networkmaine provides Internet access, email, web hosting, and other technology services to almost 1,000 preK-12 schools and libraries across the State of Maine. The MSLN Gigabit Upgrade project started in November, and to date there are 112 upgrades complete – all upgrades to schools are scheduled for completion by April 2021. “NetworkMaine does a fantastic job supporting Internet access for Maine’s schools,” added Vince Vanier, Technology Coordinator for the Madawaska School Department. “We would be in a world of hurt without it.” Networkmaine was able to leverage E-Rate funding to bring bandwidth relief to Maine’s preK-12 schools this year. The FCC made additional E-Rate funding available in September in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. ### About NetworkMaine Networkmaine is a unit of the University of Maine System providing Maine’s Research & Education (R&E) community with access to high-bandwidth, low-latency connectivity and complimentary services that enhance their ability to successfully deliver on their missions. Created in 2009 by a memorandum of understanding, Networkmaine operates through a coordinating council which is comprised of the University of Maine System, the Maine State Department of Education, the Maine State Library, and the Maine State Government Office of Information Technology. The Networkmaine Council provides the public entities served with greater involvement in shaping the future of Maine’s research and education network, MaineREN.
Study From Car Initiative
Last updated on: 9/11/2020 at 9:30 am With the closure of public schools and the subsequent transition to remote learning, many schools have identified a lack of adequate Internet access in the homes of some of their students, limiting the ability of those students to participate in online learning opportunities. Networkmaine has offered assistance to the roughly 140 local schools that have their WiFi networks provided through the Maine Learning Technology Initiative in creating an additional “guest” WiFi network. This additional WiFi network will be completely segregated from any existing network(s) at the school. The hope is that the MLTI wireless service currently bleeds out of the building to the extent that someone could park in the parking lot and obtain service, allowing them to participate in online learning while maintaining the social distancing that the school closures are intended to facilitate. We have already heard from schools that are repositioning their WiFi access points near exterior wall and windows to help extend the outside coverage. We have dubbed this effort Study-From-Car as a play on the phrase work-from-home that has become so prevalent in the media. We encourage participating schools to use the hashtag #studyfromcar if they make any announcements on social media. If your school is doing something similar and would like to have it added to this map please drop an email to us at: NOC@maine.edu or fill out the form below. 03/23/2020 – In response to the overwhelmingly positive feedback we have received, we are now including any member that has a guest WiFi service and wants to be included on our Study-From-Car map. 09/11/2020 – With the state still in the grasp of the pandemic and remote / hybrid learning models being widely used, we will be keeping this map up to date during the 2020-2021 school year. Locations will be removed if they can no longer provide public WiFi and new public WiFi sites will be added as they are reported to us. [iframe src=”https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/embed?mid=1vZrvHKkHhAVLdV21sRRPbhuMOCnIRTCl” width=”640″ height=”480″]
MLTI WiFi and COVID-19 school closures
With the closure of public schools and the subsequent transition to remote learning, many schools have identified a lack of adequate Internet access in the homes of some of their students, limiting the ability of those students to participate in online learning opportunities. For MLTI wireless schools, there may be a way that Networkmaine can assist you in addressing these situations. Networkmaine is offering to enable, for the duration such a service is needed at a school, an additional “guest” SSID. This additional SSID would be completely segregated from any existing network(s) at the school. The hope is that the MLTI wireless service currently bleeds out of the building to the extent that someone could park in the parking lot and obtain service, allowing them to participate in online learning while maintaining the social distancing that the school closures are intended to facilitate. These are the details of what we are proposing: The SSID will be ‘mlti-guest’ and would be an open network (no form of authentication needed). The new ‘mlti-guest’ SSID would be seen everywhere the school’s MLTI SSID(s) are currently seen. Traffic on the new ‘mlti-guest’ network will use a separate network from anything in use at the school, and will be completely segregated from all existing school networks Networkmaine will provide DHCP and NAT services for this traffic, if needed or desired (see caveats). Traffic from the new ‘mlti-guest’ SSID can optionally be delivered to the existing LAN interface, on a separate vlan from the existing wireless traffic to maintain segregation, if access to local resources is needed. The new ‘mlti-guest’ SSID would be removed when normal school operations resume (or upon request) to prevent students from using it in favor of the existing managed school network. Some caveats to be aware of: If you are currently using the MLTI guest wireless service, this offer does not apply to you (you are already effectively doing what we are proposing). Though you may consider removing any restrictions you are placing on your guest wireless network currently (if you lock out school devices, or restrict bandwidth for instance). If your MLTI management path includes a VPN router or passes through school network infrastructure, Networkmaine will not be able to enable the NAT and DHCP features (we can tell you if this applies to you if you aren’t sure). In some cases we can work with school network staff to work around this, but where VPN management is in use it may not be technically possible. In such cases the service could still be enabled, however the school would have to provide NAT and DHCP services. Umbrella content filtering and security services will be applied. If you have any questions about this offering or are interested in deploying this new temporary wireless service at your school, please contact Networkmaine. #studyfromcar
Understanding Network Impacts of Increased Online Learning Activities
This document describes how campus, regional, and Internet2 networks provide access to cloud-based learning today, and what will change as campuses migrate to online learning by off-campus students. This information is intended to help our members understand these changes. While COVID-19 presents unprecedented uncertainty, Research and Education Networks (“R&E Networks”) will play an important role in supporting our campuses and K12 schools as they move online. Infrastructure usage patterns are already changing greatly from traditional campus learning environments, in part because of the massive shift of users from purpose-built campus networks to consumer-oriented home networks. Note that throughout this document the word “campus” is used generically to refer to a higher education campus, K12 school, or any other facility belonging to a Networkmaine member. When students and faculty are on campus, they use a well-tuned campus infrastructure that is blended with remote cloud computing resources through Networkmaine and Internet2. Those networks are provisioned with substantial capacity for research data and also afford “headroom” for activities like Learning Management Systems and video-based online learning applications. These learning applications are often hosted on servers that are actually located off-campus in cloud computing data centers. When on campus, student traffic travels over R&E networks to these remote data centers. We can expect that network traffic patterns will change when campuses implement COVID-19 “work from home” and “learn from home”. This paper outlines a few scenarios on the potential effect this shift in the location of users may have on the way in which online resources are reached. It is important to note that the following scenarios depict typical traffic patterns. There will be situations where a different traffic pattern will occur, or specialized engineering is in place that may impact specific campus patterns. Scenario 1 – How Network Access to Online Resources Works from Campus Today and how campus participants in online education will continue to work Let’s start by showing how faculty, staff and students on a campus ordinarily reach cloud-based learning resources. In this typical instance, a student on campus uses the campus network, Networkmaine’s network and a peering connection either through Internet2 or an Internet Exchange Point (IXP) to reach the cloud data center. These networks are all tuned with abundant capacity that anticipates the historical usage patterns of faculty, staff and students on campuses and the academic schedule’s usage demands. We can expect that as students move to residence halls and other spaces on their campus for online learning, they should have an excellent user experience that leverages long term investment in high quality networks on the campus, in the region and nationally. Those networks are already tuned for a typically much larger user base and should not require any remediation for the new use. Internet2 and Networkmaine’s networks are actively monitoring the network traffic patterns for these users as an added layer of assurance. Scenario #2 – Students and Faculty learn/work from home and campus moves teaching online using cloud-based resources When students reposition to home locations, these traffic patterns change. In most cases, it is likely that the network traffic from the student to the cloud providers where their institution’s learning management systems and video applications reside will use commercial networks (i.e., the broadband in their home or apartment) and will no longer traverse the R&E networks. The exact path a home user takes to a cloud provider is somewhat opaque and not manageable by the institutional IT staff that normally plan the path and performance characteristics of network traffic. The consumer commercial networks are generally designed around peak consumer utilization (ex: Friday night Netflix streaming) rather than the academic schedule or academic applications that R&E networks tune for. The consumer networks also do not support large research data sets and as a result may have less inherent “headroom” for the sudden growth of video and online learning. A large influx of new traffic for online learning, together with other increases in daytime home use, may take some time for these networks to absorb. Some congestion of these networks and their interconnections to cloud providers may exist on the home networks that could impede performance of online learning in unanticipated ways. Planners may wish to consider contingencies for poor performing online experiences as these issues are diagnosed and capacity is added. On the upside, announcements in the media indicate some consumer networks are lifting usage caps and surging resources to respond to expected new traffic. Within their deployed infrastructure, this will make a big difference in reducing any artificial constraints. However, more work investment in physical capacity and interconnections may be required to support the new applications. That necessarily will take a little time and human effort to ship parts, install equipment and configure the new capacity. Scenario 3 – Access to campus from home using a VPN to gain access to online resources in the cloud or other resources on the campus One potential variation to the scenario above is for faculty and staff who use a Virtual Private Network (VPN) client on their computer to secure a path to the campus. Some campuses require or advise their faculty (and to a lesser extent students) to utilize a VPN to securely access resources that are located on the campus (e.g., ERP systems used by administrators, research data sets including virus research, and learning resources that are not in the cloud). VPNs can be configured to route all of the user’s traffic (both traffic to on-campus systems and the rest of the Internet) to the campus VPN server, or they can be configured to send only campus traffic to the VPN server. The later, sending only campus traffic to the VPN server, is known as a “split tunnel” configuration. Without split tunnel, traffic to services such as Zoom and Blackboard will first travel to the campus VPN server, then it will use the campus’s connectivity to travel to its destination (e.g., traffic to Zoom would first travel to the campus network, then Networkmaine’s network, then to