In late 1993, the very first KETS Network was implemented as a dial in system with 8 modems and a Wildcat Bulletin Board. I was a KETS Regional Engineer at the time. The expectation from our Director, David Couch, was that we use the KETS Bulletin Board System to access contract files and other KETS information, much the same way we use the KDE WEB site today. Soon afterwards we had email and could access the Internet via this bank of 19.2 baud modems. I know that some of you are saying “What the heck is a 19.2 modem”? Google it. For us at the time this was flying high. The service also included district Superintendents and Principals. Without a formal help desk we were all forced to take help desk calls, some even at home. At the time there were no networks in schools, with the exception of stand alone labs with network hubs bolted under students’ desks and there were no schools or classrooms with Email, Internet or Student Information Systems. We had a lot of work to do and there was certainly a lot of improvement on the horizon.
In the summer of 94, the Office of Education Technology led the effort to establish a true wide area network (WAN) and a local area network (LAN) in every district office in the state. This was on the heels of the first Kentucky Information Highway (KIH) contract establishing high speed (56kb and T1) pricing for every town, city and county government agency in the state. Using the first KIH contract all 176 districts and 8 Regional Service Centers received a 56kb high speed connection along with a common email system (Microsoft Mail at the time) and the common financial system MUNIS. This effort was called the DAS (District Administrative System) and also established modern workstations, a network printer and file server in every district office. By now we had established a professional outsourced Help Desk to handle the growing number of technical issues. We did not have the expertise of operating or managing a professional help desk. OET assumed the role of managing this service even though it resided in another Kentucky town. There were new technology items installed that districts had never seen before such as a router, a CSU|DSU, network hub and CAT 5 wiring. Each of the 56kb circuits was connected to a local university network hub. There were 11 such hubs scattered across the state. In some cases there were as many as 25 districts connected to a single university hub sharing a T1 with the university that connected to a Frankfort based T1 Internet connection. I watched this grow from 1 to 3 T1’s in less than 6 months. We were told at the time that no one would ever need more than 3 T1’s. OET added engineering level staff to provide technical leadership in the area of networking. I guess you could say we had a network team of one. Trust me; I knew improvement was just ahead.
An application came along in 1995 called KTLN (Kentucky Tele-Linking Network) that would provide a video conferencing area for all universities and 60 Kentucky school districts. This application required a 384 kb connection for two way video conferencing between schools and universities and anyone else in the world that had similar technology. So for 60 districts the 56 Kb connections were upgraded to a T1 and a portion of that circuit (384kb) was dedicated to the KTLN video service and the remainder was used for data. The basic university hub design stayed the same but the pipes had to get bigger to handle the KTLN traffic and increased the demand for Internet access. The Internet pipe improved to 6 T1’s and we added additional expertise to accommodate the demand.
By now it had become apparent that the current network design could not be maintained to a viable level to meet the growing demand from school districts. By far Kentucky school districts were the biggest users of the network. School districts had wired their schools, built their local area networks, implemented workstations in ever classroom and connected many of their schools to their district hub site to access the Internet, MUNIS, Student Information System and the many instructional tools now available. We needed improvement. In 1996 a new technology offering was made available on the KIH contract. It held all the promise to provide additional bandwidth capacity to the KETS Network at an affordable price. The very first Frame Relay network was established in the KETS Network by the Pike County School System. The nature of this new “shared network” concept allowed a large district to connect schools with a much reduced cost in hardware infrastructure. For large districts this became the preferred vehicle to quickly and inexpensively connect their schools. A plan was put in place to migrate the KETS Network to a Frame Relay design. The new Frame Relay design provided additional bandwidth, eliminated the need for university hubs and bottlenecks and opened an easy and affordable upgrade path. This was a clear and much needed improvement. Now schools were really pushing the shared Internet connection. It grew to a DS3 (45mb) mostly because it was less expensive to buy a DS3 than to add additional T1’s. That should hold us forever. We were flying high again with our new Frame Relay network and DS3 Internet pipe.
The nature of Frame Relay really was beneficial in moving the KETS Network into a modern environment. However, it did not take long for Kentucky schools to feel the wrath from this once promising technology. Oversubscription on the KIH network and the state Frame Relay network became a huge issue and what was once a T1’s worth of bandwidth was constricted at many periods of the day, particularly during school hours when everyone was competing for the same bandwidth. Again we needed improvement. In 2001 OET initialized a project to convert every district to a point to point (not shared) network design that brought every district T1 back to Frankfort. We called these “homeruns” and with this design felt we had actually hit a grand slam. This is the network we have today and it has truly served us well. The design and contract offerings allowed us to add additional T1’s to a district’s capacity, maintain manageability, take maximum advantage of the hardware we already had in place. We could also implement new technologies, such as Packetshaper to easily measure usage and shape the traffic to gain maximum benefit. OET implemented caching and firewalls for security. The hardware footprint at OET continued to grow in size and complexity. We called this “the core”. The Internet connection grew to an OC3 (155mbps) and we used it all. It was now evident that instructional classroom usage would continue to drive the need for a bigger network.
As more and more instructional applications were discussed it was evident that another improvement was close at hand. We would quickly outgrow the network again and did. By 2005 many districts had outgrown the T1 based network. The initial KIH contract did not satisfy the need for additional bandwidth and had been re-bid. New and improved technologies were on the horizon and now in reach with the new KIH 2 contract. Many schools now had high speed Ethernet networks running over fiber links within their buildings and between their schools. Workstations were much faster and much more available to students. Instructional use had reached an all time high and the number of network centric applications, both instructional and administrative, are pushing past the limits of the current network.
It is 2007 and the KETS Network is going through yet another improvement phase. Our legislature and leaders have recognized the need for improvement and have provided the financial means to accomplish this improvement. The improvement will be in the form of 10 and 100 meg Ethernet pipes into every school district in Kentucky, bringing the Internet and other network resources closer to the user than ever before. This is a totally new design with many new business drivers and requirements. High availability and continuous support needs will be met differently that before. We have, as technology workers, gone through many improvement steps in an effort to meet timely needs and should expect that to continue in the future.
Continuous improvement is the building block of the modern technology worker. As much as we hate change we should equally embrace improvement. Sounds like a twisted oxymoron; and it is. During this time of improvement we may indeed find ourselves again in an uncomfortable position. I do promise we will some day look back on this time as opportunity for personal improvement as well as historically view this time as another technology improvement in the history of KETS.