Schmidt Consulting Group, Inc. | Consulting Engineers | Fiber Optic and Metropolitan Area Network

The School District of Escambia County, over a five year period, extensively restructured their wide area network to provide a fiber optic and wireless network completely free of local service providers and their recurring costs. Prior to 2002, the District's network consisted of 71 different sites which all had to pay monthly recurring fees to local service providers. These fees totaled over $450,000 per year. The speeds of this network varied from 256kbps (kilobits per second) to 16Mbps (megabits per second). The low bandwidth of these connections effectively limited useful access of educational tools to students.

The final phase of the project provided for all the District's sites to be connected with approximately 65 miles of fiber optic cabling running Gigabit Ethernet (1 Gbps) or high-speed wireless connections (at 43 to 220 Mbps). Many of the sites are also connected to each other via wireless connections to provide further redundancy in the network.

The district is now free of recurring service provider costs for their data services and provides nearly 100 times the speed of its previous network, all while spending a fraction of the previous cost on maintenance.

Schmidt Consulting Group, Inc. provided feasibility studies, life cycle cost analysis consulting, conceptual design, wireless link path analysis, outside plant fiber optic design, detailed construction document design, wireless tower structural design, and right-of-way permitting for the all phases of the School District's new Metropolitan Area Network.

K-12 Educational | Telecommunications