Communications

Wichita School District Implementing NEC's Univerge SV9500 Network

• By Richard Chang
• 12/01/16

NEC Corporation of America is assisting Wichita Public School District (WPS) in Kansas in its migration to a new Univerge SV9500 communications network designed to meet the district’s needs for up-to-date integrated telephone and unified communications for the foreseeable future.

WPS’s new Univerge SV9500 network will provide the kind of flexible communications environment it was seeking as it migrates from a legacy TDM-based platform, a news release said. With more than 100 sites consisting of a diverse range of facilities such as schools, administration facilities and alternative programs, WPS’s campuses needed everyone in its organization to be able to communicate easily with outside callers and with one another. WPS decided to migrate from the Univerge SV8500 to the SV9500 platform, a system that supports virtualization and is suited for large enterprises and geographically distributed (multi-campus) networks.

WPS is the largest school district in Kansas, educating about 10 percent of all public school students in the state, and more than half of all school-aged children in its home base of Sedgwick County. The district is growing and now has more than 51,000 students, with the trend likely to continue as its traditional pre-K–12 student enrollment is at its highest level in more than 10 years.

WPS Chief Information Officer Cathy Sweeney said the safety of the school district’s employees and students was her highest priority in making this decision. The new SV9500 system provides 99.999 percent availability (less than 6 minutes per year of downtime), therefore offering a high reliability unified communications platform, according to the news release.

A secure, redundant network provides the foundation for the other key criteria WPS was seeking: cost-effective delivery of technology and content services of high quality to enrich teaching, learning and staff development.

As part of the network transition, WPS migrated its primary and secondary data centers to voice over internet protocol (VoIP), and to achieve a higher level of reliability and redundancy, installed a high availability Wide Area Network (WAN) failover component between the two data centers. In addition to the operational cost savings the new VoIP network provided, NEC worked with WPS to migrate to session initiation protocol (SIP) to also reduce carrier costs.

For more information on NEC, visit the company’s website.