Wave Business, Wave Broadband’s business division, has connected 39 Modesto, California, school facilities to the district’s data center hub with dark fiber, giving the competitive provider a foundation to attract local businesses and other wholesale carrier customers.
Like other local school districts, the Modesto City School district can take advantage of dark fiber due to changes in the FCC’s E-rate program rules.
By leveraging dark fiber, the school district can deploy its own network equipment to deliver connections between any sites at whatever top speed their hardware supports, enabling greater flexibility to support data connections needed for students, faculty, and staff.
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Specifically, the dark fiber solution enables the district’s IT team to scale secure data connections at speeds up to 100 Gbps between its hub and schools, customizing the connection capabilities for each facility and office. A high school with more students and multiple computer labs may need more bandwidth than an elementary school with fewer technological needs, for example.
Additionally, the district’s IT team can allocate more bandwidth during registration or exam periods when online activity is at its peak. Out of the 39 connected schools and facilities in Modesto City Schools, 22 are elementary schools, four are junior high schools and eight are high schools. Additional district support sites can have access to internet speeds of up to 100 Gbps.
This dark fiber deployment also has a potential ripple effect for Wave as well. Now that it has established Modesto City Schools as an anchor customer tenant for its local dark fiber, the service provider could seek out fiber internet connectivity opportunities for other area businesses and government agencies.
Wave told Fierce Telecom in an e-mail that the service provider is establishing a network access point in Modesto to be ready for future network service demands.
“Beyond benefiting thousands of local students, teachers, and administrators, this opens up a new choice for other Modesto area businesses: Wave is currently building a new hub in Modesto to service any additional customers that will want Wave services,” Wave said. “If all goes as planned, this should be ready within this quarter.”