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Rural community goes
wireless
The Upper Grand District School Board comprising the counties of Wellington and Dufferin,
Ontario
The Challenge: Comprised of 71 schools, over 33,000 students as well as 20,500 Continuing
Education students and 2200 teachers the Upper Grand District School Board stretches over 4,000
square kilometres of scenic Southern Ontario countryside. That means a lot of rural connections.
Existing system replaced: the school board was using a Bell ISDN Centrex cloud which would
give them an average of 56 K speed or a little more, not acceptable for the needs of the students
and their teachers. PacketWorks installed their WAN through multiple solutions specific to the
location of the different schools. This
is hundreds of times faster than their previous system yet cost $75,000 less a year than Bell’s.
Fibre alone could not be a solution because it could not be installed cost effectively in every school
and legacy telephony would cost multiple times more than the budget they had in order to reach the
speeds achieved by the PacketWorks network.
Testimonial
The Upper Grand District School Board
contracted with PacketWorks approximately 5 years ago and manage the Board’s wide
area network.
This network consists of approximately 75 sites connected via a number of technologies.
The technologies include fibre optics, copper DSL, copper T1 and wireless. Each technology
was chosen in order to maximize bandwidth given availability of service and budget. PacketWorks
installed the service promptly and continues to provide outstanding service.
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