Ways to land a cheap WAN

The boom in network buildouts in some school districts is because of creative negotiating between state and local governments and service providers.

"If a you're running the school network, you may want to review your town's current arrangement with the local cable company," says Curtis Lee, director of technology of the Pasadena Unified School District in California.

By negotiating with cable company Time Warner and Pacific Bell, Pasadena secured its own strand of single-mode fiber-optic cable throughout the district, which it uses to connect five schools and an administration building via Gigabit Ethernet. Time Warner let Pasadena buy the fiber at cost while the cable company installed it on PacBell-owned utility poles when Time Warner upgraded its network.

In addition to getting the fiber, which would have been impossible for the district to afford on its own, Lee installed Layer 3 Gigabit Ethernet switches from Allied Telesyn throughout the district. The switches - with a mix of 10/100M bit/sec ports and single-mode Gigabit Ethernet uplinks - cost between $1,500 to $2,500 per building to install, compared with the $3,000 to $5,000 for competitive gear from Cisco, Extreme Networks and 3Com, Lee says.

"It's basically the fastest, cheapest WAN you've ever seen," he says.