Lee County Public School System's Technology Initiative

To implement a Wide Area Network among all of their schools and offices, Lee County Public Schools chose to rent bandwidth from the Bell Atlantic public frame relay system.

Rather than make Lee High School and the Vocational-Technical School separate locations, they decided to connect them as a LAN using multimode fiber optic cable. With this connection more than 25% of Lee County’s students are served on a LAN, thus saving bandwidth charges. This LAN was then connected to the frame relay cloud via a T1 connection.

Since it has the largest number of students, the Lee High LAN was chosen as the location for the library database server and the main Web server. These services then have to be retransmitted to the other schools, hence the need for a T1 line to the cloud from Lee High School. The thirteen other schools and the central office are connected to the frame relay cloud using 56kbs lines.

Internet service is provided to the system at Lee High via a T1 frame relay line. However, at this time the ISP restricts the Internet bandwidth to 256kbs for a cost savings to the school system. A proxy server handles all of the Internet traffic into and out of the system to maximize bandwidth utilization and manage inappropriate site access.