The late Stephen Covey in his book “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” introduced the term BIG STONES, as a way of identifying the important issues that each of us or our organizations must focus on first in order to be effective. One of KENET’s 2015 big stones is, “deployment of KENET-owned last mile broadband connectivity up to 20 main campuses of universities, university colleges, research institutions and other Government affiliated institutions”.

Broadband has proven to not only increase economic development, but also to have a positive impact on the productivity of organizations. According to a United Nations report released February 2013, “broadband connectivity has the potential to transform education by giving teachers and students access to learning resources and technologies that will allow them to improve their skills in the context of a globalized economy”.

There are THREE things we would like you to know about broadband for your campuses:

1. The automation of your institutional administrative information systems (e.g., financial information systems, student portals etc), means that you need to setup an offsite disaster recovery site to mitigate risk of information loss. This can be setup; at one of your satellite campuses, at one of KENET data centres or at another university campus that you trust. It requires high-speed broadband connection of up to 1 Gb/s between the primary site and off-site backup site.

2. Broad is necessary for access to off-campus multimedia educational content. Students who own laptops and smartphones are; listening to and accessing YouTube lectures of their favourite professors (even in engineering and surgery), Khan Academy rich video content for tutorials in Physics, Maths and Biology, and all new e-learning open content which now has some video clips. Access to these contents and applications by your students and faculty members will require broadband “last mile” connection.

3. Broadband is NOT equal to Internet bandwidth commitment! For example, 35 member institution campuses have a 1 Gb/s (1000 Mb/s) connection over fiber to KENET or to other campuses but their International Internet bandwidth commitments are on average less than 100 Mb/s per institution.