Networking & Wireless | News

2 California Districts Upgrade WANs to 10 Gigabit

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 10/08/14

A Southern California school district with 6,000 students has gone public with the five-year contract it has signed to obtain the use of a 10-gigabit fiber optic wide area network (WAN) to replace its previous Sunesys 1Gbps fiber optic Ethernet WAN. The cost of the services for Monrovia Unified School District was budgeted at $222,000 annually with e-rate funding picking up 70 percent of the expense. The new agreement, also with Sunesys, runs from July 1, 2014 to June 30, 2019.

Another district in the region, Garden Grove Unified, signed a similar agreement in 2013. There, the district sought the upgrade of the network running among eight of its secondary education sites. Garden Grove estimated that its monthly costs would be a third of the amount bid by a former provider after E-rate and state teleconnect discounts were applied.

Garden Grove, with 48,000 students, is building out a converged infrastructure to provide voice over IP, high-definition video, access to cloud-based content and wireless at high speeds "to enhance the end user experience," said Rick Rodriguez, director of information systems. "The need to partner with a professional optical infrastructure provider was crucial to connect our school computers labs, classrooms and administration offices back to our wide area network and enable classrooms, schools, and offices to exchange information electronically in addition to Internet access. The system is the largest of its type among Orange County school districts."

Monrovia's upgrade delivers connectivity among 10 locations. "Monrovia is continuing its initiative to deliver Wi-Fi and mobile devices to every classroom. Our teachers are using our network to build lessons with Internet, and streaming video content on a daily basis," said Chief Technology Officer Jason Buchanan. "A fast and reliable network infrastructure is a necessity to ensure our teachers can deliver their lessons problem-free. Sunesys has delivered a very reliable, high-speed 10G fiber network with minimal impact on my support team's time, allowing us to focus on supporting our teachers' needs."

Sunesys maintains high density fiber optic networks in major metropolitan areas across the country.