Leonard Cooper Upgrade Plan

Current Issue Leonard Cooper is a K-12 school with approximately one thousand students. After adding a new wing to the building, their outdate network system grew to be a prominent issue. After interviewing four stakeholders, Leonard Cooper’s network system current situation can be summarized as following. The school uses the network for computers in 23 classrooms, 50 network printers, VOIP phone system, HVAC controls, and several school administrative offices. The HVAC needs at least 100 Mb bandwidth. Even though the network cards on desktops and laptops can support up to 1GB of data, the current network is connected using 10Base-T twisted-pair, offering a maximum bandwidth of 10Mb. Regardless of the large number of printers, they still overload all the time. The transmission media connects old and new building wing backbone switches are 120 meters apart, but the maximum suggested distance for twisted-pair is 100 meters. It also appears that there is not enough ports on the current network switches to support computers in all 23 classrooms, 50 printers, and automated HVAC controls. Additionally, there is no wireless connection on campus.
Solutions
To fix the network capacity problem, the preferred choice is to replace 10 BaseT cable with Category 6 UTP 1000Base Ethernet cable. This will increase the data transfer rate to 1GB, which therefore ease the early morning congestion when all classrooms are taking attendance and checking emails. The new cable will also satisfy the need of HVAC technician for remote accessing to his devices. To integrate VOIP with current data system, fiber optic should be used as backbone transmission media. This