THERE once was a noted college institution which wanted to provide Internet access to every student.

It wanted a networked electronic library for public access, paperless communication through an intranet, online registration and enrollment and a single network connecting all its offices and the technology lab.

Eventually, this campus also wanted its network to have the capability to do teleconferencing and streaming video. It wanted to pump in programs from its television studio to every computer on campus.

Colegio de San Juan de Letran in Intramuros got what it wanted--and probably more. It finally wired its campus and upgraded its existing Ethernet network to Gigabit Ethernet.

Letran's systems manager Rey Reyes stressed that between two of today's networking protocols--ATM and Gigabit Ethernet--Letran chose the latter because it offered a more cost-effective option, mainly because the campus had an existing Ethernet infrastructure.

He further explained that Gigabit Ethernet is emerging as the standard, and that standard has been for many years Fast Ethernet.

With Gigabit Ethernet, Letran will be able to provide uniform access to services in all its labs, including the Internet lab to be established in the library. Centralized applications will also be available throughout the network, Reyes added.

With Gigabit Ethernet as the network backbone, all kinds of information--data, voice and video--will be shared.

Kenneth Palacios, 3Com Philippines channels manager, described Letran as the "most high-tech school" in the old Manila area. He stressed that Letran is the first campus in the area to use Gigabit Ethernet for its network backbone.

Palacios added that Gigabit Ethernet is becoming more visible. From January this year, he cited that 3Com has had 10 Gigabit Ethernet sites ranging from educational institutions, telcos, data providers, application developers and multimedia companies which do video animation.

"If you compare it with the cost of ATM, it's a lot more affordable. In terms of speed, the question really is how much data could be pumped up," Palacios said.

He added that there are still a lot of people skeptical about Gigabit Ethernet and others complain that there is still no existing standard for the technology. Palacios said standards are already in place, specifically for the fiber version. This, he said, will be ratified in January 2000.

"For the assurance of everyone, the standard would include CAT 5," he said.

Letran's campus-wide network went live last month using its core switch called SSII Switch 9000, an eight-port Layer 3 fiber-optic gigabit switch (1000BaseSX).