The Walker School Selects Comcast Business Class Ethernet

The Walker School, a college-preparatory pre-K-12 independent school in metro Atlanta, recently adapted Comcast (News - Alert) Business Class Ethernet to cater to the needs of the students and to grow its use of online learning tools and applications across a seven-building campus.

The school currently supports more than 1,000 students, 180 faculty and staff with 400 computers for accessing the Internet, educational applications and online resources.

School officials said they also encourage the “bring your own device” (BYOD) concept, and thus there were typically 100-150 mobile devices simultaneously on the network accessing the Internet, educational applications or other content.

With all these facilities, the school's previous 15-Mbps Internet connection was insufficient, and after a thorough search, the school has selected Comcast to address the growing needs.

The new deployment is helping the school to support more iPads and cloud-based applications on campus, and maintain the online systems for creating and recording report cards, grade books, attendance, group collaboration, and communicating with students and parents.

"We experienced periodic downtime with our previous vendor, and it was important for us to have a more stable connection, especially with more and more devices accessing the Internet," said Kerry Bossak, director of technology for The Walker School. "While the increased bandwidth and guaranteed network uptime were important factors in switching to Comcast Business Class, the cost advantage is a big deal for us because it means we have the bandwidth to support our technology in education initiatives while saving money to invest in other areas of education."

The Walker School officials were impressed with Comcast Business Class Ethernet service for one more reason: it was enhancing the school's bandwidth whenever needed, just by making a phone call to Comcast.

And this facility has helped the students, teachers and staff see continuous access to the educational tools and resources they need to promote education in a rapid virtual community.

"As more schools move to online learning resources and integrating connected devices into the curriculum through programs such as BYOD, having fast and reliable Internet connectivity is essentially the blackboard and chalk equivalent of 21st century classrooms," said Bob Deckard, regional vice president, Comcast Business Services, Atlanta.

Deckard said they are able to provide reliable, high-performance connectivity to their customers that can easily scale up as their bandwidth demands change.

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