November 11, 2004. Spokane, WA -- Mead School District #354 has selected Columbia Fiber Solutions to supply a Gigabit Ethernet WAN between 10 of the school district's buildings.
"The implementation of the Gigabit Ethernet wide-area network by Columbia Fiber Solutions will have a tremendous positive impact on the learning environment available to the students and staff of the Mead School District," said Dan Butler, director, technology, planning and budgets, for the Mead School District. "Our wide-area network will allow us to dramatically increase the network capacity between our facilities to transfer video, video conferencing, graphics, voice, data, and Internet at extremely high speeds between the buildings on our private network. The new network will reduce our overall communications costs and improve the security and reliability of the school district's critical infrastructure. In addition, we will be able to share and support numerous new bandwidth-intensive applications and take advantage of recent innovations in the areas of video on demand, voice over Internet Protocol, and distance education."
With over 300 mi of fiber-optic cable and 250 buildings already connected to its metropolitan fiber network, Columbia Fiber Solutions has already achieved success in Spokane, Liberty Lake, Coeur d 'Alene, Hayden, and Post Falls, WA. Since acquiring Avista Communications' fiber-optic network in Spokane and Kootenai Counties in 2002, Columbia Fiber Solutions' has extended its customer base to include Inland Northwest customers in the areas of education, healthcare, financial services, telecommunication carriers, manufacturing, broadcasting, call centers, utilities, government, and gaming as well as many small businesses.
The Mead School District #354 is the second-largest school district in Spokane County with approximately 8,500 students, two 4A high schools, one alternative high school, two middle schools, and seven elementary schools.