Case Study: Exalt Delivers Scalable Bandwidth for Maywood School District 89

Maywood School District 89 provides K-8 education for approximately 5,500 students in suburban Chicago. The District’s facilities include ten schools and three administrative buildings located in Maywood, Melrose Park, and Broadview, Illinois. Like school districts across the nation, Maywood School District 89 has increased its use of computers and networking technology to improve the quality of education it provides while making its operations run more efficiently. Recently, the District upgraded to Exalt microwave radio systems for higher bandwidth that scales easily into the future, and for greater reliability under all weather conditions.
More Applications, More Bandwidth
In the late 1990s, the District deployed a microwave radio network to link its facilities. Over the years, this network has come to support Internet access for the district’s 1,200 computers along with student record-keeping, e-mail, automated heating and cooling systems control, and other applications. By 2008, the network had reached its limits: the available bandwidth was no longer adequate to support current and planned applications, and the microwave radios had begun to fail.
“The District chose microwave radio technology in the late 1990s because we wanted to own the network and avoid paying high monthly charges for T1 lines,” says Bob Hodges, director of technology at Maywood School District 89. “Over time, we kept expanding the list of things we wanted to do with the network, and by 2008 many of the radios were at their end of life. We decided it was a good time to upgrade the bandwidth and features since we had to replace the radios anyway.”
Hodges and his team consulted with Chicago-area wireless networking consultant Wireless Information Networks (WIN), which had provided installation and support of microwave radio systems to the District in the past. WIN chose Exalt EX-5r-c and EX-5i microwave radios for the network upgrade.
The Exalt radio systems would roughly triple the network’s available Ethernet bandwidth to 100 megabits per second (Mbps), and the radios could scale to 200Mbps through a simple firmware upgrade. But there were other aspects of the Exalt solutions that made them the right choice.
“WIN chose Exalt because the company had a good reputation for reliability and performance,” says Hodges. “The graphical management interface was also an important feature, because we wanted to be able to do more of the routine maintenance ourselves.”
Summertime Switch
Once the decision had been made to use Exalt equipment, WIN and the District waited until the summer of 2008 to do the upgrade to avoid disrupting classroom work. “Exalt was very helpful during the process,” says Hodges. “They sent a couple of engineers out here to oversee the deployment and make sure everything was working right, so it was a very easy and fast transition.”
WIN deployed Exalt EX-5r-c radio systems at the District’s technology center in Melrose Park and at the two largest schools, and then linked four other schools to this network with Exalt EX-5i radio systems. The distance between hops averages about a mile.
Since the deployment, Hodges and technicians from WIN have used Exalt’s built-in spectrum analyzer and management interface to adjust radio frequency bands. As the EX-5 series radios operate in the license-exempt 5GHz frequency band, interference with other nearby radio sources is always a potential issue.
“A lot of areas around here have been putting in municipal video surveillance cameras, and we have seen some interference from those networks,” says Hodges. “With the Exalt management interface and the spectrum analyzer, it was easy to adjust frequency bands to minimize interference remotely from our technology center.”
Scaling for the Future
The Exalt radio systems have been very reliable since deployment. Heavy snowstorms over the past winter reduced the network bandwidth for brief periods, but the links have never gone down. “Overall, Exalt’s reliability and the functionality are much better than we got from our old systems,” says Hodges. “We just keep adding applications to the network, and we have plenty of bandwidth.”
Recently, the district has added video surveillance to improve campus safety and security, and Hodges likes the idea that he can continue adding new applications without worrying about having enough network capacity. “If we hit the 100-megabit limit, we can do a simple firmware upgrade and go to 200 megabits per second,” he says. “That’s a fantastic feature.”
And when it is time for configuration changes, Hodges and his team can often handle the work themselves rather than calling in consultants for a site visit. “The web interface is great,” he says. “We can easily see what’s going on with the network and handle the maintenance ourselves, so that saves on costs.”
In all, the Exalt radio systems have improved the Maywood School District’s efficiency. By delivering much more bandwidth with simplified management, it has allowed the District to continue improving its educational resources while reducing management costs.
Quote
“If we hit the 100-megabit limit, we can do a simple firmware upgrade and go to 200 megabits per second. That’s a fantastic feature.”
–Bob Hodges, Director of Technology, Maywood School District 89