A case in point is Boston College , which spent nearly a decade planning and designing a new, campus-wide communication system that allows the school to offer its students a spate of new communications features while simultaneously reducing its overhead. The quality of our competition has really gone up, too. We're now seeing kids who have also been accepted by Notre Dame, Princeton and other schools. Expanded greatly, it's the same paradigm telecom network providers are finding themselves in today. This whole thing has been about 10 years in the making.
Students access the network via a unique wall plate that has voice, video and data connections.
The approach worked well for BC, where space was at at premium. This approach brought both space and cost savings. One of the biggest challenges the school faced was interfacing the network with a wide variety of PCs and Macintoshes, as well as the software that was resident in the machines. While the network was primarily constructed to tie the school's three separate campuses together, an important feature is one that allows students and faculty at least telephone access to the network even when they're off-campus. This type of connectivity, too, helps the school save money.