Thousands of students in Kerala will soon be able to
scorch the asphalt on cyber autobahns, thanks to a Rs. 4-crore tie-up
between the IT@School programme and Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL)
to put in place a Virtual Private Network (VPN) over broadband for
public schools.
The VPN will be realised with a 100
Mbps leased lined connection supported by Multi Protocol Label Switching
and with 20 Mbps bandwidth as its backbone. Seventy-five per cent of
the project cost would be absorbed by the Union government under the
ICT@School scheme. A specialty of the scheme is that BSNL is providing
the VPN at one-fifth the market rates.
A memorandum
of understanding between the government and BSNL was signed here on
Tuesday at a press conference called by Education Minister P.K. Abdu
Rabb.
Education Secretary Shiv Shankar said at a
press conference that the VPN would be up and running in about a month.
The State government has claimed that this would be the
first-of-its-kind network in the country for educational institutions in
a State.
The facility would be given to 2,495 high
schools, 1,236 higher secondary schools, 377 vocational higher secondary
schools and 233 upper primary schools. Close to 300 offices of the
Education Department — the offices of Deputy Directors, District
Educational Officers, and Assistant Educational Officers, District
Institutes of Educational Technology, and 35 Block Resource Centres in
Kerala — would also be part of the virtual network.
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