March 2008 — News
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Case Study: Bloomfield SD's Migration to Broadband and VoIP
As the IT director for Bloomfield School District in New Mexico, I faced a major challenge with our infrastructure when it came time to upgrade our network and voice systems to meet our educational and technological objectives. The district, with 10 administrative and school sites, is located in a rural area of northwestern portion of the state, which limited the alternatives available to us. Its network was based on T1 connections, and the bandwidth would not support the education initiatives of the district. It was also very expensive, costing us about $5,900 each month.
On top of that, another large budget item was $60,000 we paid for annual maintenance on the PBX. Unfortunately we could not rely on Priority 2 E-Rate funding for the maintenance because our E-Rate discount is 77 percent. Funding cutoff for Priority 2 services has varied from 69 percent to 84 percent over the last five years. Bloomfield did not have the budget to upgrade the network, pay for voice T1s, and pay $60,000 in annual maintenance fees.
As it turns out, there was a single solution to both of these issues. Partnering with broadband provider Trillion Partners, Bloomfield was able to deploy a WAN with 10 to 100 times the bandwidth of our previous system and migrate our legacy PBX system to a voice over IP (VoIP) service--all for less than what we had previously been paying.
The Costs
For our district's educational objectives, the obvious option--adding additional T1 lines at 1.5 Mbps--would not have met our bandwidth needs and would have added unreasonably to costs. I met with Trillion, who demonstrated to how we could best implement a broadband WAN that would provide 10 to 100 times the bandwidth of the old network and save money. And we'd be able to eliminate our old T1 lines and the cost of maintenance for our PBX-based voice system by implementing a VoIP service as part of the deployment. (And, as an added bonus, we'd eliminate the onsite maintenance requirements of that PBX.)
With VoIP, we were able to eliminate most of the expensive T1s. And, because Trillion's service is Priority 1, we essentially turned the $60,000 that we were paying out of pocket for PBX maintenance into $261,000 worth of Priority 1 E-Rate services. (As a 77 percent E-Rate district, we pay 23 percent out-of-pocket. Hence $60,000/0.23 = $261,000.) The savings from eliminating T1s and the buying power of Priority 1 services helped us fund both our new broadband WAN and our new VoIP services for less than we were paying before.
Improved Network and Telecommunications
This new high-speed broadband WAN has helped us revolutionize communications within our district, providing over 10 to 100 times the bandwidth of our old T1 network. This year we are deploying 15 new teaching and administrative applications across our district to enhance learning and increase productivity.
