Zayo Enables Denver Public Schools to Increase School Bandwidth by 500%

Denver Public Schools in partnership with Zayo Group Holdings, Inc. has completed implementation of a dark fiber private network across its district.

The high-capacity fiber network spans more than 600 route miles of fiber, which included more than 50 route miles of new build to reach 132 schools. The dark fiber network provides DPS with increased capacity, improved reliability and a more cost-effective solution.

The dark fiber network has increased the capacity for each DPS school location by approximately 500%. The additional bandwidth enables DPS to leverage digital resources in K-12 classrooms, including electronic textbooks, online standardized testing, streaming media, educational resources and cloud-based applications. The increased capacity has also eliminated congestion issues caused by the district’s largest bandwidth requirement and key security initiative, video surveillance.

The solution architecture provides DPS with greater reliability. The design includes multiple rings to each of the districts data centers so that impact from fiber cuts and other network interruptions are minimized. This ensures that the network remains up 99.9% of the time.

By leasing the fiber from Zayo through a long-term agreement, the solution is much more cost effective for DPS than purchasing data services from third party providers. Schools are increasingly leveraging long-term lease agreements for dark fiber as a cost-effective solution.

“Denver Public Schools thanks our voters who approved the 2016 bond initiative that made this exciting network upgrade possible,” said Dave Landy, CIO, Denver Public Schools.

“Zayo’s dark fiber is an optimal solution for organizations that prefer to manage their own network and are looking to benefit from lower total cost of ownership. By lighting and managing the network on their own, customers benefit from greater capacity, control, security and scalability,” said Jack Waters, president of Zayo Networks and COO. “We are excited about the completion of this milestone project in our home state of Colorado that is enabling an important new dimension to learning for students in the district.”