EtherChannel has been a game-changer on the campus network. For this discussion, you are taking on the role of Tommy, the new network manager at a local community college. Before Tommy was hired, the campus upgraded to Gigabit Ethernet but due to recent growth, the network has been experiencing some bandwidth issues.

One day, the vice president of the IT department approaches Tommy and explains that he recently read an article about EtherChannel and is curious to see if it would help with the bandwidth issues without having a major impact on cost.

• Describe how Tommy would deploy EtherChannel on a campus network.
• Are there costs associated with implementing EtherChannel that might make it undesirable?
• Are there hardware considerations that might make it impossible to implement EtherChannel?
• What are the benefits of running EtherChannel on a modern switched network?