K-12 Campus Networking

Customer Situation

A K-12 charter school in the Midwest opened their doors two years ago. Today they have three campuses spread across the city. Their business plan calls for opening a new campus each year for the next five years. While the school is somewhat understaffed with its teaching facility, they recently created an IT department who is responsible for the development and management of their telecommunications solution.

The school system recently purchased Permethius, an interactive white board which is set up on a central server.   They also utilize a centralized administration server for maintaining report cards, attendance, school programs, etc.

Today the campuses are all networked to the School District.   The various districts are then connected to the Region.

 Business Needs

The charter school needed more bandwidth for the network between the 3 charter school locations.   They needed to increase their bandwidth, yet do so without incurring any additional capital costs.   They have a single firewall which they wanted to use to be able to protect all of the sites, existing and future.

All sites need access to the interactive whiteboard.   They wanted to be able to pull it off of the server and run it at their remote sites.   Classrooms would use this technology for distance education, within the classroom, for sharing Discovery Channel programming, and for other applications as well.  

Solution

tw telecom presented a VersiPak VRS solution to the customer.   A VersiPak VRS 10 Meg solution along with 10 Meg EIS for Internet was provisioned at the school’s main site via the Metro Ethernet Network.   The other two locations were configured with VersiPak Mach2, including 1536 kbps VRS data and 8 voice channels.  

VersiPak VRS is a Layer 3 private LAN extension.   It allows the school to transfer private data between their multiple locations and differentiates traffic destined for a campus from traffic destined for the Internet.

The VRS solution is simplistic and doesn’t require much management on the part of the IT department.

 Benefits

Since the school is understaffed, they can save money with remote access and distance education.   The centralized firewall allows the school to block students at all locations, from prohibited Internet sites.    Also, the school system benefits from the VersiPak VRS solution being simple and low maintenance.   It will allow them to meet their growth goals of adding a new facility a year.   VersiPak VRS doesn’t require a capital investment at the remote sites, allowing the school system to control capital costs.

Diagram