Oct. 3, 2019
Media Advisory
What: Groundbreaking for SAISD’s new high-speed fiber network installation
Nearly 80 miles of fiber will connect every SAISD campus and office facilities.
Who: Patti Radle, SAISD Board President
Superintendent Pedro Martinez
Dr. Kenneth J. Thompson, SAISD Chief Technology Officer
Martin Mueller, UPN Fiber Regional Sales Director of Education Sales
Principal Ibarra-Landford and students
When: Oct. 4 (Fri) – 10 a.m.
Where: Barkley-Ruiz Elementary School, 1111 S. Navidad St.
Remarks will begin in the school library and then proceed outside.
With the signal of the official flag, equipment operators will start a large directional boring machine and begin the horizontal directional drilling into the ground – the first step in installing the District’s dedicated Wide Area Network (WAN).
A $7 million grant and additional state funding will fill the need for a dedicated high-speed fiber network for all schools and offices within San Antonio ISD. Students will benefit from fast and reliable connectivity, enabling even more innovative digital learning opportunities.
Under the Federal Communications Committee’s (FCC) E-rate program, SAISD received a grant to implement its dedicated WAN. The District’s WAN will facilitate lightning-fast network and internet speeds at all SAISD campuses for the next 10 to 20 years.
In addition to the FCC funding, the District was approved for state matching funds for the special construction portion of the project. This means that the District incurs no cost – 95 percent of the construction cost will be paid by E-rate and the state of Texas will pay the remaining 5 percent.
The custom fiber network has unlimited capacity, making it scalable for future needs such as an increase in student population, an increase in the number of facilities, or the future use of new tools that require a much higher bandwidth. The majority of cable being placed will not be used by the District at the inception of the process, but it is available to be tapped as needed based on the amount of data being carried on the network.
Nearly 80 miles of fiber will connect each campus and office to the District’s WAN. The network will work in conjunction with the wireless infrastructure on individual campuses as the District continues to update systems and technologies over the next few years.
For those campuses and offices that will have the infrastructure in place to connect to the WAN, such as the 13 schools that are part of the 2016 Bond, the new network will be ready for service in the summer of 2020.