Education Case Study:

The Near North District School Board

The Challenge

The Near North District School Board was facing significant connectivity challenges in the 48 sites under their jurisdiction. Covering 25,000 square kilometres of rural area was proving difficult. Existing connectivity speeds were too slow and security for the WAN was not meeting the Board's extensive requirements.

The Mandate

The school board needed to expand existing applications to the remote schools, specifically with video conferencing options and the IP Telephony system for all schools in the jurisdiction. In addition, many schools on their VLAN required upgrades to the level of service and speeds.

Packetworks Response

Drawing on our many years of experience with inter-city microwave, Packetworks successfully designed and implemented a private WAN using both a unique combination of pre-existing  DSL, fibre, T1 and wireless technology plus additional installations we provided as needed.

Packetworks performed a detailed wireless path analysis between each site to determine vulnerability and predict tower heights. From this analysis we were able to determine the most reliable paths that perform over 99.95% of the time.

Benefits to Near North District School Board

The WAN is now customized to meet the needs of each individual school in the NNDSB: network availability is now at 99.95% and speed has increased for every site from 1.5Mbps to 6Mbps on average. In addition, Packetworks has improved the security of the WAN, bringing it beyond the standards of the NNDSB. User experience with the Packetworks network has improved dramatically.

Packetworks has been working with the Near North District School Board for several years now and remains committed to providing innovative solutions for their connectivity needs.