Southern Door School District: a better network for a fraction of the quote
A full network and phone refresh that cut the proposed hardware bill by more than $300,000 and ended per-phone licensing, with the district's own IT manager back in control.
Where Southern Door started
The district asked us in the spring of 2022 to replace an old Cisco phone system. Planning the rollout turned up a bigger problem: the network switches could not power or carry modern VoIP phones.
Underneath was a mix of Cisco, very old Aruba and HP ProCurve switches, an aging Palo Alto firewall, and cabling left by several vendors over the years. The district paid licensing on phones and equipment, and its technology manager often had to open a vendor ticket and wait for an outside technician to fix the district's own network.
The proposed upgrade path would have kept the licensing and cost $445,000 for new switches and $45,000 for a new firewall.
“In licensing fees alone, going with Quantum has already saved us, and will continue to save us, tens of thousands of dollars a year.”
What we did
We treated it as one project instead of three. Over the summer an engineer worked at the school nearly full-time so everything was in place before students came back in the fall.
- Replaced every switch in the building with UniFi switches, managed from the cloud with no per-device licensing.
- Replaced the firewall with a Netgate pfSense appliance and rebuilt the DHCP scopes and VLANs that keep students safe online.
- Installed a Grandstream VoIP phone system with full-color touchscreen desk phones and cell phone apps, with no per-phone license.
- Tore out and rebuilt the main server room cabling and patch bays so every run is organized and labeled.
The result
The new switches cost $165,000 against the $445,000 quote, and the firewall $14,000 against $45,000: more than $300,000 saved on hardware, enough for the district to keep its own spares instead of paying a vendor for them. The licensing that came with every phone and line is gone.
Just as important, the district's IT staff can see and fix their own network. Quantum supports the district as a co-managed partner: the district runs its day to day, and we back it up and take on projects. The district asked us back the following summer to lay out the network for a new office area.
What Southern Door School District says
“With the changes Quantum made, we're able to locate wires quicker and solve problems faster.”
“Their care, their commitment, and their loyalty to their customers is both amazing and unbelievable.”
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