How Cisco Connected Real Estate is Creating World-Class Buildings for World-Class Education

April 27, 2006

By Jason Deign, News@Cisco

Cisco Systems® is helping to transform education by turning UK classrooms into hotbeds of technology as part of education and government moves to upgrade school, college and university campus buildings.

The educational establishments are taking advantage of new building development to introduce an infrastructure framework called Cisco Connected Real Estate (CCRE).

CCRE is part of the Cisco Connected Learning blueprint that helps higher education institutions provide highly secure access to all educational resources, anytime, anywhere.

This allows building control systems for heating, ventilation, air conditioning, fire and safety, closed circuit TV (CCTV), lighting and other services to be managed over the same secure intelligent information network that is used for transmitting voice, video and data.

Integrating networks in this way allows schools, colleges and universities to reduce building capital and operational costs, increase safety and security, and support new services and amenities that enhance campus life for students and faculty.

"Building control systems have long been standalone, proprietary systems," says Andy Macleod, UK education sector manager at Cisco.

"As a result, operating a single building, let alone an entire campus, is extremely complex, with high installation, integration, and ongoing maintenance costs, and little ability to automate or centralize services."

"Over the past few years, convergence of voice, video and data onto a single IP network has become the norm," says Mike McKeown, manager for the education sector at Cisco in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.

"The next wave is the ultimate in convergence, when everything with intelligence in the building is connected to the common IP network and, effectively, IP becomes the fourth utility."

The advantages of CCRE include:

• IP building control systems for heating, ventilation, air conditioning and lighting significantly reduce utility bills and enable organizations to meet more stringent energy efficiency regulations.
• IP closed circuit TV (CCTV) is far less costly to deploy and run than traditional proprietary CCTV systems, making it practical for campus-wide coverage with centralized and automated monitoring and recording.
• IP CCTV can significantly reduce vandalism and theft costs and provides evidence in the case of any incidents where the authorities must be involved.
• IP CCTV creates a safer environment for staff and pupils. Schools deploying it have reported significant reductions in bullying. One even installed IP CCTV in girl's toilets after discovering children were going all day without drinks so as to avoid visiting them, because of bullies.
• IP Phones in classrooms also contribute to a safe and secure environment since they allow teachers threatened by abusive pupils to call for help or record an incident at the touch of a button.
• Passive Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) access control tracks who is where in the building and restricts access to authorized people.
• Access control can be linked over the network to the fire alarm system so that in the event of an alarm the list of building occupants is instantly printed out for a roll call.
• Books in the library can be RFID tagged. This reduces book loss and theft and frees librarians from administration, enabling them to focus on value-added services such as assisting learners and researchers.
• Wireless networks can provide location-based services, with assets such as projectors and PCs being tagged with a new generation of active Wi-Fi RFID tags. If an asset is moved from a specified area, security can automatically be notified and IP CCTV used to find the thief.
• Shared assets such as lab equipment can be more quickly located using the same system.
• People can also be tracked with active RFID tags or if they are carrying wireless IP phone. For example, the closest maintenance and security staff can quickly be located and dispatched to an incident.

Running all building systems over a single IP network is not unique to the UK; Cisco itself developed the CCRE concept to manage and plan workspace across its worldwide real estate of 400 buildings.

And intelligent building networks are being used in France, Germany, the Netherlands and Saudi Arabia, where 3,000 schools a year are being built.

However, in the UK education sector the idea of introducing "smart campuses" has been given extra impetus by a government initiative called Building Schools for the Future (BSF) which aims to modernize and rebuild every single secondary school in the country over the next 15 years.

The program will kick off in the next year or so and will ultimately cover primary schools, too.

Meanwhile, however, the UK college sector has stated that more than 50 percent of its buildings need replacing and it has already spent more than £1.7 billion on 300 capital projects in the last two years.

There are also significant new build and refurbishment programs in the university sector.

As a result of this, and of growing awareness of the benefits of CCRE within the building and education sectors, Britain is beginning to boast an enviable number of state-of-the-art educational institutions.

Jason Deign is a freelance journalist located in Barcelona, Spain.