Maximize your K-12 IT resources with a centralized voice network

In today’s communications landscape, K-12 school districts must find ways to keep their operations running while managing costs. In light of this, organizations are transitioning from traditional voice technologies like Primary Rate Interface (PRI) to IP-based Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). As an IP-based technology, SIP is easier to consolidate and centralize to one or two locations and requires less hardware to maintain and manage.

A voice infrastructure that is centralized provides more flexibility and offers a way for leaders to ease demands on their IT teams, increase efficiency and cut costs. Achieving the optimal balance between cost and performance requires planning and selecting the trunking architecture that best meets business objectives.

Why centralize your voice network?

Centralizing PBX equipment and voice trunks makes enterprise networks simpler to maintain and easier to scale while achieving uniformity of experience across all sites.

In a distributed model, each location must have a PBX and a separate connection to the public phone network. Centralization can consolidate all of the organization’s PBXs and voice trunks into a single data center, eliminating the need for multiple PBXs. As a result, calling capacity can be shared across the school district, regardless of whether the phones are located in the same building.

A centralized voice network lets IT teams maximize their limited resources. Consolidating voice resources into a single location can streamline their workload and free IT staff for evolving business priorities. Repetitive tasks like phone line moves, adds, changes and deletes can be completed quickly. Likewise, it’s easy to manage business policies like international call restrictions and customized outbound caller ID from a centralized location.

Legacy solutions, such as PRI trunks and other older technologies, can be left in place alongside a centralized phone network and migrated on a timeline that makes sense for your school district. Many school districts need to retain analog equipment like older point-of-sale systems (e.g., cafeteria registers) or fax machines. Allowing for this legacy support can be crucial in many school districts eager to modernize other parts of their voice infrastructure.

Centralizing trunking and PBX equipment also benefits hybrid systems. School districts with varied needs can upgrade some schools to cloud-based unified communications while maintaining on-premises phone solutions for other locations. This approach lets IT managers get the most out of their existing voice infrastructure while introducing additional applications like video calling or business collaboration tools when and where it makes sense. With centralization, you can upgrade your telecommunications system for better efficiency, at your own pace, without disrupting day-to-day operations.

Use case: A suburban school district

A small IT staff supported the voice infrastructure for two dozen schools and administration buildings. As an economically mixed district, the organization previously qualified for a substantial discount on analog trunks through a federal program. But funding cuts forced the district to reassess its overbuilt voice system and substantially reduce the number of call paths before the next school year.

Any acceptable solution had to accommodate a tight installation timeline over summer break. To ensure the school year would begin without disruption, the district required the ability to turn on new equipment in stages. Throughout the project, IT managers and district leadership also needed to assure parents and district taxpayers that the organization is a good steward of its limited resources for school technology.

Unique needs

The school district maintained more voice calling capacity than it actually needed — with separate PBX and PRI trunks at each school. And lack of federal funding for voice services posed a significant challenge for the district.

Educators count on access to phones in classrooms, offices, gyms and other spaces for reliable communication in an emergency. Voice traffic on most of the organization’s trunks was light, but incoming calls to district and school offices often peaked during snow days and in the week before classes started. The district’s IT team needed a way to reduce its voice spending while ensuring any given site maintained reliable access to the public phone network at all times.

Project challenges

Any new solution would be managed by three employees who were also tasked with troubleshooting network issues at locations as much as 30 minutes away from their offices at district headquarters. Reducing their workload both during and after the installation was a high priority.

Transitioning locations to the new technology also had to take place on their schedule. Summer programs and other network maintenance projects scheduled when school was out of session left a limited window between late June and early August to complete the setup of the new solution. At the same time, legacy equipment scheduled for decommissioning needed to remain operational throughout the transition for uninterrupted 911 access.

Budget considerations and separate projects of record for district data networks constrained the extent of changes to the voice system. Any new system had to provide basic phone service while remaining compatible with more advanced technologies in the future. Retiring aging phone equipment in networking rooms at each site also made financial sense. Most of all, the district wanted to address the E-rate funding issue while retaining the autonomy to upgrade the phone network at its own pace. District control of the rollout schedule to avoid interruption of the school year was paramount.

The new solution

The school district found it could confidently reduce its call paths by half with a centralized system. Transitioning PRI trunks to SIP trunks would then create further savings in the district’s spending on service contracts.

The project brought phone networks previously maintained at each location into two data centers. Because the organization had upgraded its wide area network three years earlier, much of the infrastructure was already in place for internally routing calls. The district deployed new SIP trunks with 200 call paths. That would be more than enough to accommodate peak traffic once those call paths were shared across the organization. Incremental adjustments to voice channels also became less expensive, as call paths can be purchased in smaller increments with SIP trunks than with PRI.

In addition to cost savings, the voice upgrade offered several practical benefits for district administrators. The new network dashboard made district phone policies easy to implement system wide. Usage information and billing also became simpler to manage. The end result was more hours for technology professionals to spend focused on students.

Over the summer, SIP trunks were installed in parallel to existing analog deployments, allowing the organization to decommission older equipment on a batch basis when each location was ready. Schedules for summer programming that varied from school to school were not an issue as a new site could be brought online at the discretion of district IT.

A centralized system with the right number of SIP trunks set the school district up for long-term success while also freeing technology resources for the organization’s primary mission — educating students.

A trusted partner

As more school districts upgrade their communications, voice system modernization offers much more than an opportunity to replace outdated hardware. An upgrade to centralized trunking can reduce maintenance, trim operational costs and strengthen system reliability — all while meeting the unique requirements of school districts.

Work with a service provider that has the knowledge and experience to help you achieve successful implementation of a modern communications experience. Spectrum Enterprise can evolve your voice network with superior client service to create a system that is flexible, secure and future-ready.

Learn more.