Paradise Valley Unified School District: Improved educational experience through advanced communications, IPTV and eLearning applications

The Paradise Valley School District (PVUSD) faced the challenge of economically and flexibly connecting a 47 campus district. The buildings are spread over 98-square miles of rolling terrain and need to connect back to the District's Administration Center. Each of the campuses download Giga-bites of data back to the District Administration Center for critical record keeping information for the 34,000 student district population daily. With Excess Utilities going away in Fiscal Year 2008/2009 and the future uncertainty of Federal E-rate funding, PVUSD decided it was time to build out their own private WAN infrastructure. The question and challenge facing Paradise Valley USD was how to accomplish this major feat.
 

The Strategic Plan to Move the District into the Future

Paradise Valley USD had been paying for T-1 connections between all the campuses. The lines were expensive and cumbersome but were required to handle the voice, video and data traffic created by a district teaching students in Kindergarten through 12th grade. The district, situated in the fast growing area of northeast metropolitan Phoenix and the southern edges of North Scottsdale, was pushing the limits of the T-1's bandwidth and reliability.

NIC worked with the district and other vendors to develop a network enabled for Internet Protocol Television (IPTV), Voice over IP (VoIP), and eLearning applications connected through secure wireless connections.

Paradise Valley USD and NIC are creating a stateof-the-art learning environment for the PVUSD students.

The implementation used Ceragon FibeAir™ links to the campuses with 1 Gig-E Ethernet connections to the high schools, 100Mbps Full Duplex to the middle and elementary campuses, and a GigaMax 1.25 Gbps link to the Distribution Center. The bandwidths of each link were determined after evaluating the data needs of each campus type. With the districts move to IP video distribution as well as IP telephony it was determined IP traffic was the priority and standard for the district.

The majority of the campus links were mounted directly to the existing campus structure. The links were strategically placed to ensure un-interrupted connects between the links using Line of Site (LoS) studies. The District Administration Center (DAC) required the erection of a 100ft monopole along with a 65ft monopole at Desert Shadows Middle School that replaced an existing light pole. NIC worked with the District to ensure community buy-in and approval of the added wireless monopoles. As an AZ Licensed General Contractor, NIC handled the entire zoning process with the City of Phoenix, Federal FCC licensing and foundation and construction requirements of the project.

This same network will also allow for a single video-database that can be controlled centrally but accessed anywhere within the district. This will create a virtual library allowing teachers and staff to share resources easier than before.

Multiple FibeAir links at the High Schools keep data transferring at connection speeds supportive of voice and video traffic.

The links operate primarily at 18GHz and 23GHz frequency spectrums transmitting data from the Cisco network systems pre-existing within the district campuses. The network is designed for 99.999% reliability with continuous operational monitoring done by both the district and NIC via Intermapper software.

The District is now leveraging their existing Cisco network and the new campus-tocampus wireless connection to integrate a VoIP system using Cisco IP Phones in classrooms, administrative offices and everywhere in-between. Because the voice traffic is routed over the data network, inter-campus calls come at no additional cost, providing the early and long-term return on investment (ROI).
 

A BRIGHT FUTURE

With the Paradise Valley Unified School District's investment in technology, they have enabled themselves to provide superior education to their students and created a state-of-theart teaching environment for their staff. Not only is the District the fourth largest in the state of Arizona, it has the largest district-wide wireless network in the nation that will provide early and continuing ROI in the classroom and the bottom-line.