Located 40 miles northwest of Chicago, Community High School District 128 is recognized locally, statewide and nationally for its outstanding academic and extracurricular programs. Today, the district announced that it has deployed Comcast Business’ fiber-based Ethernet services to support a new digital learning strategy.
District 128 serves approximately 3,400 Libertyville and Vernon Hills High School students. In addition to portions of Libertyville and Vernon Hills, the district also serves students from Green Oaks, Mettawa, Mundelein and Rondout, IL, as well as some of the surrounding unincorporated areas. To support its digital initiatives, District 128 worked with Comcast Business to deploy a fiber-based 500 Mbps Ethernet Dedicated Internet connection, as well as a 1 Gigabit Ethernet Private Line connection between the two high schools. The faster connectivity supports Wi-Fi in the schools, which enables students and teachers to use the netbooks in classrooms and apps, and will help the district migrate to PARCC, the standardized online assessment tool and resource that will be mandated by the Illinois State Board of Education for the spring of 2015. The network can scale up to 10 Gbps to accommodate future enrollment and network traffic growth.
“Over the past few years, we’ve seen a dramatic change in how students use the Internet. It’s evolved from a text-based search tool into to an educational ecosystem that includes rich, bandwidth-intensive videos, applications and web services,” said Mick Torres, District 128’s Educational Technology Director. “We also recognized the role mobile devices play in helping students engage with content and develop their own styles of learning. The Comcast Ethernet network played a key role in providing the network capacity to support the roll-out of the netbooks, which provide a platform to extend the learning experience beyond the classroom.”
Prior to deploying Comcast Business’ fiber-based Ethernet services, the district’s maximum bandwidth was 100 Mbps at each high school. The plan was to increase to 250 Mbps per site but the district was actually able to increase bandwidth at each site to 500 Mbps – within its budget – which is five times the bandwidth before the transition.
