SPS makes plans to upgrade to new fiber wide area network

May 23—The Stillwater Public Schools district will be getting a new private fiber wide area network in about nine months and without any startup costs.

Bryan Bloomer, SPS director of technology, presented the proposed changes for the district's infrastructure at the SPS Board of Education meeting May 14. The Board voted to approve the infrastructure changes.

"The key thing here is how this future-proofs the district," Bloomer said.

The wide area network, or WAN, is a computer network over a large geographical area that facilitates the connection between various sites to their Internet Service Provider, the data center and to each SPS office.

The new WAN will increase data connection speeds at each site and offer improvements over SPS's current WAN.

Bloomer said the current infrastructure is suitable, but the upgrade is a huge significant upgrade as far as speed, reliability and resiliency.

"It sets us up very nicely for the years to come and allows us to do things that we weren't previously able to do," Bloomer said.

The SPS technology department finalized a master services agreement with Vero Networks, which will work with the technology department to design and construct the new WAN to connect all district sites over an estimated project window of nine months.

SPS had previously used Chickasaw Telecom as its preferred WAN. SPS shared a bandwidth with other entities on the network and had a 3 gigabyte per second connection at all sites except the data center.

Chickasaw Telecom's service provided a mix of aerial and underground cabling with a standard "hub and spoke" design with a single connection at each site.

But this year was a bid renewal year, and it was time to reconsider SPS's current network status.

Bloomer said he worked with Kellogg and Sovereign — a consultant firm that helps schools, libraries and health care providers receive the funding they need to stay connected — to develop the bid, and after consideration, the department chose Vero Networks.

"Essentially, since I was going into it my first time, my goal was to see what we can upgrade without incurring a whole bunch of additional cost," Bloomer said.

Bloomer looked for a network with higher speeds, greater resiliency and improved incident response.

Vero Networks provides fiber network infrastructure for more than 100 school districts across 15 states, and in Oklahoma, it provides services in the Moore, Weatherford, Santa Fe and Turner public school districts.

Bloomer said what set Vero apart and made SPS choose them as the winning bid is their "ring" topology, which is a solution that connects all sites in a circle, or ring, instead of one site being the hub and all the other sites a spoke connecting back to the hub.

The design allows two simultaneous connections to each site to the data center, so that if one site loses connection, there's another connection that can cycle back to the data center and facilitate traffic.

The new network would allow for 100% underground cabling where possible (which would help keep trees from falling on network lines), offer two times the connection at every site, a private fiber network exclusive to SPS, a support facility in Tulsa, a guaranteed two-hour service level agreement response time and critical equipment "spares" provided at the hub location for free.

All costs for the construction would be included in a monthly proposed fee.

The monthly fee per site per month is set at $1,514.67, and SPS currently has 15 sites.

Total costs, including construction costs, would be $1,363,203 over a five-year period.

Bloomer said that the costs were similar to other bidders for the network.

The upgrade will be subsidized through the E-rate program and the Oklahoma United Services Fund.

Vero's WAN services qualify for a Federal Communications Commissions E-rate subsidy. The E-rate program helps schools and libraries as they navigate the complex federal funding process.

In the 2024-25 academic year, SPS will now be eligible for an E-rate discount of 80%. Costs covered by the E-rate program would be approximately $1.1 million.

The OUS fund will cover the remaining costs not covered by E-rate (up to 125% of the lowest cost reasonable qualifying bid), which would be approximately $273,000.

"All of that means, with E-rate and OUSF, the district pays zero dollars out of pocket for this fiber upgrade," Bloomer said. "So it's nearly a $4 million upgrade that we don't have to pay a penny for."

As the technology department, currently located in the Cimarron Plaza, fades out its network use, Vero will set up a new connection for the new high school.

Bloomer said his team is targeting March 1, 2025, for the network transition. Vero will work in four phases as they move everything over to the new system.