Supporting Philadelphia Schools with Cutting-Edge Telecommunications

Background/Situation

The School District of Philadelphia (SDoP), one of the nation’s largest school systems, had 228 schools with more than 230 separate phone systems. While the equipment had been cutting edge when installed 15-20 years earlier, the technology had reached the end of its life. SDoP wanted to upgrade to a UCaaS system that would increase management efficiency and comply with upcoming 911 regulations.

Challenges

Every facility had its own on-premises controller, so each school’s communications required a separate manager. The systems had little built-in redundancy, which reduced security and reliability. The sheer size of the school district—20,000 endpoints—made system-wide implementation of new applications and features difficult.

In addition, the new system needed to comply with two upcoming federal 911 regulations that will add three requirements:

• The ability to dial 911 with no extra characters
• A valid callback number
• Automatic definition of the location of an emergency, including floor and room numbers.

SDoP also needed a solution that combined the best of both worlds: the efficiency of centralized, cloud-based communications with the need for local control at every site.

Solution

VOIP Networks began by designing and installing a “private cloud” system that added several capabilities and safeguards. First, the system was both redundant and resilient, offering greater reliability if a natural disaster or technical issues affected any facility. Second, the upgraded system was easily scalable, making it simple to add facilities or users.

VOIP Networks built the private cloud environment in two of the district’s data centers, and then implemented the first phase of the new system in 30 schools before deploying the remainder of the system on a rolling implementation. Throughout the process, VOIP Networks provided white-glove service to the schools, with daily status calls, ready availability of subject matter experts to answer questions, and extensive training.

Results

SDoP once again benefits from state-of-the-art communications technology. The new UCaaS system delivers improved security and reliability, and it complies with both current and upcoming 911 requirements. Communications management is much more efficient, as well as centralized, making it easy to quickly spot and solve issues anywhere in the system. The system now has multi-device and call-twinning capabilities, so users can work remotely when they aren’t able to get to their schools.

“Modernizing our telecommunications system was a massive undertaking with no margin for error. Everything had to work the first time, and the schedule had to be met. VOIP Networks made our priorities their priorities. They were proactive in spotting and solving issues, often before we even realized there was an issue. They kept us informed every day, answered every question, and worked with our internal staff. We couldn’t be more pleased.”