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As a cooperative of 19 school districts in Rochester, New York, the Board of Cooperative Educational Services (B.O.C.E.S.) serves a lot of very demanding, tech-savvy clients: nearly 100,000 students, faculty and administrators serving kindergarten through 12th grade.
We sell services to schools, be it special education, busing for districts, just about any service they want to buy," explains John Poland, Supervisor of Research & Development for Monroe County #1 B.O.C.E.S. "The group that I'm involved with supports technology in the schools. We do everything from infrastructure to staffing to providing applications."
As with IT professionals everywhere, the last few years have seen John and his team devote more time and resources to building and improving the networks that connect their district clients' IT systems. "Over the years, we've built networks in each of those school districts. Our most recent project was to connect them all together back to B.O.C.E.S., providing them access to the Regional Information Center." And thanks to Fibertech, not just any access. After years of T1 connections and incremental upgrades, the districts will now be able to enjoy a state-of-the-art high-speed WAN Gigabit Ethernet.
A Whole new class of opportunities.
The flexibility and virtually unlimited bandwidth of their new Fibertech network has allowed B.O.C.E.S. to take advantage of technologies like streaming video, says Poland. "We are up to about 600 videos that we are offering digitally. We're previewing probably another 1,000. We're also looking at streaming real time." Rolling out this new service system-wide has only become a possibility with the help of the new network, he says. "We did some pilot projects initially, but to really do it, the direct fiber optic connection was going to be required."
Beyond the added benefit of a dramatic upgrade in the speed of their Internet access, Poland also foresees an increased use of advanced voice applications by the B.O.C.E.S. districts. In fact, it's already underway. "One of our district's is doing voice over IP across their network. I see us quickly expanding that to other districts."
The network voted most likely to succeed.
Looking ahead, their new gigabit Ethernet network will also allow B.O.C.E.S. to connect to the ultra high-speed next generation Internet through NYSERNET, the New York State Education and Research Network.
It all means that whether it's today or well into the future, whatever applications and technologies B.O.C.E.S. wants to utilize to help their students excel, their Fibertech network will be ready. "Bandwidth is just not an issue," says Poland. "For a number of years it was always an impediment to implementing the technology, and now it doesn't come up anymore."
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