| Cisco Systems and Data Eclipse help a school district in rural Ohio deploy a converged wireless IP Communcations network. | |||
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| By Eric J. Adams Photograph by Drew Endicott |
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| Article Contents: First-Class Services | Towering Implementation | Local Booster |
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 The Wayne Trace Local School District is about as rural as they come. It serves only around 1,100 students from kindergarten through 12th grade, yet it covers 180 square miles of mostly farmland in northwestern Ohio.Not surprisingly, the three-school district doesn't have a lot of money. And until recently, its budget woes were aggravated by a telecommunications quirk that placed the district at the intersection of not two but three telephone companies. "That meant that every intra-district call was a long-distance charge, and some parents were charged long-distance rates each time they called district offices or even their own child's school," says Rob Wannemacher, the district's treasurer. The school's antiquated private branch exchange (PBX) phone system also led to an inordinate number of busy signals and staff time spent scribbling down messages and chasing down employees, because teachers and administrators did not have individual voice-mail boxes. At the same time, the schools suffered costly and sometimes debilitating data network problems. The district's main computing hub is not in the school district, but at a regional data-acquisition site in Lima, Ohio, some 50 miles way. As a result, the district was forced to maintain three expensive and underutilized T-1 lines, one for each school. Any time data was sent between schools, it was routed through Lima, according to Jo Ellen Sisson, Wayne Trace's district technology coordinator. Worst of all, the T-1 lines were expensive to maintain, slow, and often unreliable, causing frequent interruptions. Last November, the district replaced both its aging traditional voice and data systems with a converged wireless Cisco Internet Protocol (IP) Communications network, designed and deployed by Data Eclipse, a Cisco SMB Select Partner located in Bryan, Ohio.
First-Class Services The district began reaping the benefits of its new converged voice-and-data IP network immediately. Most importantly, it eliminated the long-distance toll charges on calls between the different sites on the district's network. The IP Communications system provided robust calling features for every district employee, such as unified e-mail and voice-mail boxes, easy call forwarding for ad hoc classroom changes, guaranteed line access, and extension dialing between buildings. "For the first time, we have telephones in every classroom, and that's a big plus for security," says Wannemacher. Additionally, all incoming calls are billed as local calls because they come through local lines at each building and then are routed through the IP network. On the data side, all school servers are centrally located for easy maintenance, and data speeds reach 54 Mbps, compared to 1.5 Mbps with the T-1 lines. The district will save nearly $40,000 over the next five years by eliminating T-1 leasing costs, approximately $2,000 per year in reduced long-distance charges, and thousands more in reduced network maintenance costs, according to Wannemacher. Towering Implementation At first, the district planned to address its telephone and data needs separately. It had gone so far as to request two bids in early 2004—one for a replacement PBX phone system and another for data switches from Cisco Systems. Then Data Eclipse president Dan Glore and Cisco education representative John Ford "showed us how a single network would lower both our hard costs and continuing maintenance and telecommunications costs," says Wannemacher. Once convinced that a converged IP network was the best option, the district briefly considered the idea of running fiber-optic cable between the schools, but at a total of 20 miles apart, the estimate came to approximately $500,000. As a much more affordable alternative, Data Eclipse then proposed connecting all the sites using a wireless wide-area network (WAN). Deployment of the Cisco IP network was broken into three parts: the wireless building-to-building connectivity, the switches between the local-area network (LAN) and the WAN, and the IP Communicatons system. The deployment began in November of 2003 and lasted approximately six months. Many town residents came out to watch as a Data Eclipse team assembled and installed a 100-foot-tall tower near each of the three network sites. Once the towers were in place, Data Eclipse installed Cisco radios with directional dish antennae to act as data replicators, buried a conduit from each building to its tower, and finally connected each building's LAN to the radios. Cisco engineers worked closely with Data Eclipse throughout the process. "Cisco was there from the first pre-bid meeting through the final deployment, helping to validate the design, and providing product support," says Glore.
Local Booster The deployment was finished in the summer of 2004, but the work wasn't over. To ensure a smooth transition, Data Eclipse conducted on-site training for the district's technical staff, as well as additional training to select non-technical employees who serve as on-site experts. "We've worked previously with Data Eclipse and learned then that the company is a great fit for us because they are neighbors and provide one-stop-shop expertise," says Wannemacher. The district is now hoping to take further advantage of its converged network. "The next step is for us to create a wireless environment internally. But as for the underlying network, we feel we're set for the next 15 years," says Sisson. The lesson of the implementation, she adds, is that you don't have to be a big-city corporation to fund and build a state-of-theart converged wireless network. "Innovation isn't reserved for large organizations," says Sisson. "It can happen anywhere."
iQ Magazine, First Quarter 2005 |
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| About the Author Eric J. Adams whose work has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and Wired, writes regularly about business trends and solutions. |
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