Cape Cod Community College selected Comcast (News - Alert) Ethernet services to save on technology expenses while also providing 500 Mbps of high-speed Internet access to faculty, staff and more than 4,000 students commuting from across Cape Cod, the islands and the South Shore of Massachusetts.

Thanks to this new service from Comcast, the school will be able to reduce the time required to back up the critical files to the cloud while additionally providing the bandwidth to support educational programs for local high school students and other community outreach.

"On our old 30 Mbps connection, our backup process alone would take days, so by the time we'd be finished, it was time to start the backup again. With Comcast, backing up two terabytes of critical files takes hours," said Greg Banwarth, chief information officer for Cape Cod Community College, in a statement.

"Having this extremely fast and reliable Internet connection from Comcast allows us to look at how we operate in an entirely new way. We now have the ability to serve our students and the surrounding communities in ways that we never before thought possible, and we credit the fact that Comcast is so affordable and reliable as being a major reason for us being able to do this," said Banwarth.

Cape Cod Community College also has plans to utilize the capacity of its 500 Mbps fiber network connection for a new Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), set to launch in late 2013 that will allow students from high schools as far away as Plymouth and Martha's Vineyard to access specific software through their Internet connection.

"Comcast has been firmly committed to Cape Cod for a number of years, and our continuing expansion and upgrade of our next-generation network to offer businesses, schools, healthcare organizations and other customers more value than legacy networks is a perfect testament to that," said Barry Bader, enterprise sales director for the Greater Boston region of Comcast Business Services.

Bader said that today's higher education institutions need to reach a wide range of students, many with challenging schedules, and all while adhering to budgetary requirements.

“Using Ethernet can not only help improve on-campus learning and manage costs, but also transform the way in which these schools operate, making this a win-win situation for all," he said.