The Hardware
Wifi is okay, but a cable is better.
Unless you have a managed network, people constantly monitoring and managing a network, there can be a gap between a thing failing and you want to use it and it is not there.
Fibre in the backbone.
We have fibre coming from the mainland, to Honolulu & the Big Island, then to Kona and up in to the Campus. Fibre is good, you can run 100s of KMs of fibre at a go.
Currently we are running a couple of Fibre connections on campus, one for all the Wifi and the other for everything else. Wifi is our biggest user.
https://www.submarinecablemap.com/
Copper for broadcasting.
Once we get Fibre on to Campus and in to the main building we then build out the copper. All hardware, laptops, computers, TVs use an ethernet Jack and plug in to what is on the left here.
Our fastest Internet speed on Campus is 1,000 Mb or 1 Gb.
The cables we are putting in can handle 10 Gb!
So lots of future proofing.
What is a Gb? 1,000,000,000 bits of data a second.
When I first started in Networking over 30 years ago we thought things were really great at 100Kb, (100,000 bits a second) we could print and look at files.
A few years later we had a jump to 10,000Kb or 10Mb (10,000,000). I did quite a bit of wiring of schools in the early 2000s, by then I was installing 100 Mb networks.
When we left NZ in 2016 I had only been installing 1,000 Mb or 1 Gb networks that are actually rated at 10 Gb. Now that is a lot of speed. Year by year we have been adding a factor of ten to the speed of these networks, but our need for this speed has not kept pace, so now with a 1Gb network, and we do not come close to using that bandwidth at the PC.
Imagine, if you will, that you are producing a HD video stream from your classroom to go around the world. That requires about 5 Mb of bandwidth. So let’s call it 10 to be safe.
So with one of our existing connections to the internet we could stream up to 100 classes simultaneously.
And the cabling we are putting in has capacity for 1,000 simultaneous streams. This is the power of Copper and Fibre.