London Schools Catch Up with Technology, Reduce Costs and Increase Learning

Libraries and encyclopedic volumes still have their place in education, for now, because information technology boomed too fast for the education sector to keep up. For decades, children and teens were forced, due to lack of school-owned hardware, to share computers or save internet research to be done as homework. But things are changing in London, where students will be able to access 100 MBps of bandwidth through their school’s Wi-Fi connection.

Two thousand schools in London are set to benefit from new services provided by the London Grid for Learning’s fiber-optic-based Public Service Network, which has been serving the institutions with internet services since 2011. VoIP services and Wi-Fi will be available in schools that purchase the number of access points they require to connect their students to the wireless world of learning.

Offering VoIP suggests that the London Grid for Learning’s partnership with Virgin Media (News - Alert) Business is going to keep them in step with providing students the sort of IT once considered a luxury but now thought of as a basic learning tool. VoIP services are continuing to grow in popularity for businesses, as it allows for reduced costs for an essential service, and following this trend while it is still emerging is a progressive move in education that stands to greatly benefit students.

This news is similar to last week’s announcement that Internet2 and Vidyo (News - Alert) will be offering video conferencing tools to affiliated universities and thousands of kindergarten to grade 12 schools in America. Students can expect to be benefiting from Internet-based solutions on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean now, with easier access to research tools and options to communicate and collaborate via networks, the same way that it’s done in the real world.

Tablets, interactive e-boards and educational podcasts are just a few of the applications that the London Grid’s network will allow schools to access now. Not to mention reduced cost when it comes to the telephony networks schools use to communicate with each other.

Free communications between schools on the network is a benefit, but not the goal. Though London schools stand to save £100 million per year by accessing the Public Service Network’s high-speed service, Jeff Wollen, executive director of public sector at Virgin Media Business, said: “Sharing services isn’t just about reducing costs and improving services, but allowing different departments and organizations to use technology to work together, more effectively.”