BITS Pilani gets BITSConnect

BITS alumni and the institute’s authorities plan to wire up the BITS Pilani campus through the ambitious BITSConnect project. Abhinav Singh reports

The alumni of the Birla Institute of Technology and Sciences (BITS), Pilani, have joined hands with the institute’s management to transform the institute and put it on par with the world’s leading universities of the West. The institute wants to be ranked as number one in Asia in terms of networking and connectivity. Although other institutes such as IIT Kanpur and IIT Bombay have taken initiatives to introduce audio-video connectivity in their campuses, the institute hopes to score over the IITs once the BITSConnect project is complete.

An ambitious project

The cost to connect the campus is pegged at $1.5 million (approximately Rs 7 crore), 50 percent of this is being funded by the BITS authorities, with the alumni expected to raise the remaining amount. The project kicked off in April 2003 and is expected to be completed by the end of the year. The goals include setting up a Gigabit backbone, providing broadband access, setting up IP softphones and videoconferencing facilities in student rooms, hostels, staff quarters and the guest house, as well as wireless access in the library.

The project will help BITS Pilani’s 4,000 students and staff members stay connected even after regular class hours. Students would be able to e-mail their assignments and tutorials and use the Net across the campus and research assignments from their rooms. Ex-student Vikram G Shah, who’s now managing director of Andiamo Software Systems, says, "The project will bring in more discipline and flexibility amongst students and staff members. It will help students access the Net from their rooms and let them conduct research whenever they feel like it; this in turn will lead to an increase in their overall productivity."

The project will also help students access any lab resources using the Net from anywhere on campus. There are four major labs on the BITS campus that will be networked as part of the project. IP phone connections in every room will be implemented by means of PC software (Softphone). Students will have the liberty of calling anyone, anywhere in the world using IP telephony.

All lecture videos will be available on the Net. Access to these archived video lectures will be available to both regular and correspondence students. They would also be able to access all library resources online.

VLSI lab coming up

A VLSI lab will be set up at the BITS Pilani campus in close co-ordination with the Centre for Electronics Research at Pilani after the completion of the BITSConnect project. Shah says, "Chip designing requires highly specialised skill sets and the aim of this lab will be to develop chips that are meant for Indian applications, and that will be of great help to Indian organisations." Once the VLSI lab is complete it will be connected and it will become possible for students to access the lab’s resources online.

Cisco and Wipro team up for BITSConnect

Cisco: Through the initiative of Prem Jain—ex-student of BITS and presently senior vice president at Cisco Systems—Cisco will provide 240 IP phones, for starters. These will include 220 Cisco 7960G phones and 20 Cisco 7905’s. This is in reverse of a conventional IP phone deployment where high-end phones (7960) are usually in the minority. Here, BITS Pilani will later deploy a number of low-end (7905) phones. The high-end phones will initially be in the faculty area. The core network at Pilani will use Cisco’s L3 switching product—the Catalyst 6500—that connects the distribution layer via single-mode or multi-mode laser-grade fibre. The distribution and access layer will use Cisco’s Catalyst 4500 and Catalyst 3550 switches respectively, with the latter providing connectivity to all the 10/100 ports across the campus for IP telephony. In addition, a part of the campus will be served using Long Range Ethernet (LRE) technology, Cisco’s proprietary implementation of Ethernet over voice-grade copper wires. This deployment will enable simultaneous voice, video and data across around 4,000 nodes. The VoIP network will connect to the PSTN world using a Cisco 3745 multi service access router.

Wipro: In Wipro’s case it was Vivek Paul, vice chairman of Wipro Corporation and also an ex-student, who brought the company to the table. Wipro will be the system integrator for Cisco’s products deployed on the campus. The company will help in product installation and maintenance and training of BITS staff members. Wipro’s engineers will also work within the campus and monitor the network for a couple of years after the completion of the project.