"Route disparity and reasonable cost for the bandwidth were the min selling features. Even in the event of a disaster, including a fire, we know with Towerstream our Internet connection will be up and running."
-Mark Gold: AVP and CIO, Brooklyn College, CUNY

Brooklyn College is an innovative liberal arts institution with a rich history of offering a superb and affordable education. Founded in 1930 by the Board of Higher Education of the City of New York, Brooklyn College was the first public coeducational liberal arts college in the city. The goal was to provide a high-quality education to the sons and daughters of immigrants, working people, and others who could not afford private higher education. Today Brooklyn College belongs to the City University of New York’s (CUNY) system and collectively is recognized as the nation’s largest urban public university. Brooklyn College has been designated many times by the Princeton Review as one of “America’s Best Value Colleges”.

Increase bandwidth and minimize the risk of unplanned downtime. Mark Gold, AVP and CIO for Brooklyn College describes the school as being exceedingly dependent on the Internet. Dozens of online services are used by 18,000 students and faculty via the college’s WebCentral Portal, including: grade submission, book list tracking, attendance tracking, counseling appointments, registration, payments, and so much more. Additionally, thousands of courses are taught using the web and the University’s Blackboard course management system.

Due to the heavy bandwidth usage Brooklyn College was experiencing reliability and speed issues. Their IT department was receiving numerous complaints regarding the unavailability of applications and the speed at which they were running. In addition, the tragic events of September 11th had just occurred and reminded the college how critical it was that their Internet access was more resistant to failure.

Brooklyn College needed to increase bandwidth and find a provider that was fault-tolerant to properly compliment the 100Mbps wired telecom connection supplied by CUNY’s parent location in Manhattan.

Reliable and affordable wireless solution offers true redundancy and more bandwidth After receiving approval, Mark and his team hired independent IT consulting firm, Telcordia, to research Internet service providers. The firm found that Towerstream’s wireless broadband solution, which offered a direct route to the internet with far fewer failure points as compared to the telecoms, was the most plausible and obvious choice.

Once line-of-site was determined, Towerstream installed a 100Mbps connection. Presently, Brooklyn College load balances Towerstream and the wired provider, and has in place a disaster recovery plan as well as the necessary bandwidth to efficiently run all online services for both faculty and students. Mark is very confident that their connection will be up and running in the event of any disaster.