A Campus Area Network (CAN) is a computer network that spans a limited geographic area. CANs interconnect multiple local area networks (LAN) within an educational or corporate campus. Most CANs connect to the public Internet.
At colleges of education, polytechnics, universities, and other educational institutions, CANs provide Internet access for students, staff and faculty. CANs also enable connected users to quickly share files and data within the network: since data does not have to leave the CAN, users experience far less latency than they would when sending and receiving data within a MAN or WAN. Suppose a university’s English department requests digital copies of several books from the university library. Because those digital book copies only have to travel the distance between the English building and the library building (assuming both buildings have their own servers), the English department receives them far faster than it would if the library had to send the files over the public Internet.

Benefits

A cost-effective solution

The adoption of CAN comes with numerous benefits. The primary benefit lies in its ability to minimize costs thus being a cost-effective solution for educational institutions. This is because a major chunk of network establishment and maintenance budget is spent on the cablings and wirings.

As a Campus Area Network can be enabled wirelessly, all the costs associated with expensive cabling and wiring is no more a concern, which results in major cost savings for educational institutions. As majority of educational institutes are not profit driven and most of them are government operated, knowing the trick to reduce costs by adopting the appropriate network becomes beneficial. Due to this increasing demand in network expertise, institutions and organizations are opting for trained network professionals to offer them ideal solutions.

Wireless, Multi-Department and Fast

A CAN’s ability to work as a wireless network results in smoother network transmission and ease of accessibility. Additionally, CANs allow multi departmental access which is particularly handy for educational institutes which may have dozens of separate buildings and departments such as academic buildings, libraries, student centers, residence halls, conference centers and technology centers to name a few. CANs lead to quicker transfer speeds as the network is based on a local network, in comparison to sharing files through typical internet speeds.

Improved network security

It is also necessary to mention here that Campus Area Networks are more reliable and secure. This is due to the fact that it is entirely maintained and operated by the campus IT team. This IT team is not only experienced but is also capable of adopting measures to overcome recurring flaws of the network and implement procedures to improve the overall effectiveness of the network. Such procedures may include implementing and installing firewalls to secure the accessibility of networks and to protect it from external threats.

It is necessary to ensure protection against external threats such as hacking because universities, institutes, or even organizational networks have sensitive data that can be exploited. Additionally, the network allows the network administrators to monitor its usage and even adopt certain standards and apply proxy server to limit the websites and internet ports that users can access. All of this requires expertise and adequate knowledge about network management, which is easily attainable through network training.