Oregon is home to 17 public community colleges, many with multiple campuses spread across various Oregon cities. Demand for online classes, especially at community colleges where many are working students or returning students, has remained high at these institutions.
Link Oregon supports many Oregon’s community colleges with state-of-the-art broadband services that facilitate fast, secure and scalable connectivity across multiple campus sites as well as access to the public Internet. As the Research & Education Network with four of Oregon’s largest public universities as our founding members (Oregon Health & Sciences University, Oregon State University, Portland State University and the University of Oregon), we operate as a non-profit, enabling us to take a mission-oriented approach to serving the connectivity needs of Oregon’s student populations across our state’s community colleges.
Why Work with Link Oregon
Member-focused Service Model
As a non-profit with deep roots in the education sector (four of our five founding members represent Oregon’s largest public universities), we’re committed to using the power of equitable broadband access as a means of advancing digital equity for our community college student populations. Because of our exclusive focus on serving only Oregon’s public sector and non-profit institutions, we bring a highly member-focused engagement model that sets us apart from for-profit commercial broadband service providers. We have the in-house technical domain understanding and sector experience to serve as strategic broadband technology consultants to our Community College member institutions.
State-of-the-art Broadband Connectivity Services
Our services for Ethernet Transport and Internet Transit are based on advanced networking technologies and standards. Whether your IT department wants to directly connect geographically dispersed campuses for your community college or enable fast Internet access for your students/faculty, we deliver the high-speed speed and resilience to meet your institution’s connectivity requirements today with future scalability as needs grow. Our peering relationships with leading regional and national Internet exchanges such as (NWAX, SIX, COIX, Internet2) minimize the distance your data travels in transit, lowering the threat footprint while also enabling the fastest, most efficient access to leading online content destinations.
Single-hop Cloud Connections for IT
We peer with Internet2, the nation’s largest REN, offering one stop connections through them to leading cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platforms from Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle. Private cloud connections to these platforms are also available via the Internet2 Cloud Connect Service.
Security
With online/hybrid learning becoming the norm at many of Oregon’s community colleges post-pandemic, the increasing reliance on broadband connectivity has also increased the risk of these institutions being targeted by sophisticated DDoS attacks. Our Premium Internet Transit Service includes DDoS detection and mitigation capabilities for both volumetric and protocol-based attacks, averting threats so data traffic is protected and online student services as well as administrative operations can run uninterrupted at these institutions. Members are proactively kept informed of status of such attacks until the issue is resolved.
Direct Connections to Oregon’s Largest Public Universities/other regional REN Members
We offer direct member-to-member network connections to access our state’s large public universities online – OHSU, Portland State University, Oregon State University, and University of Oregon. This enables students and faculty at Oregon’s community colleges to benefit from secure, fast access and collaboration with these larger higher ed/research schools. Our peering with other national Research & Education Networks (RENs) such as Internet2, IRON and PNWGP provides even broader, single hop connections to the many national (even global) universities and research organizations.