K-12 School District Makes Big Move to Wireless, Giving Students, Faculty and IT Staff Hassle Free Connectivity

Davis, Pete, T H E Journal (Technological Horizons In Education)

Spring Independent School District (Spring ISD), north of Houston, Texas, is known for its innovation in technology to enhance education. In fact, Spring ISD installed a two-way fiber optic ring by burying fiber and connecting each school with Gigabit Ethernet in 1999 and has deployed 2,300 IP phones along with a converged voice, video and data network for use of faculty, administrative staff and students. As a next step, the school board wanted to provide one-to-one, continuous computer and network access to every single one of the 27,000 students in the district.

The Spring ISD IT staff knew from experience that dropping 30 to 35 Ethernet lines to each classroom was not feasible or economical. At $200 per drop, the cost was prohibitive. But with wireless it was a different story. Because Wi-Fi is extremely flexible and cost-effective, the IT staff quickly realized that 802.11 technology was the obvious choice, if it could be made truly …

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Publication information: Article title: K-12 School District Makes Big Move to Wireless, Giving Students, Faculty and IT Staff Hassle Free Connectivity. Contributors: Davis, Pete - Author. Journal title: T H E Journal (Technological Horizons In Education). Volume: 33. Issue: 15 Publication date: October 2006. Page number: 22+. © 2009 1105 Media, Inc. COPYRIGHT 2006 Gale Group.

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