The Fayette County Public Schools WAN is connected together by an array of capabilities. At the end of the last school year, the interconnections between schools and Central Office (CO) were served by seven T-1 lines - one from each high school, and one each from the two KTLN sites at Dixie Elementary and Windburn Middle, and two frame relay connection "clouds" supplied by the phone company (currently Alltel). Those two frame relays collected 128k or 384k connection lines. Since that time, a dozen or so T-1's have been added - most to connect schools to nearby higher speed connections - and a wireless initiative has added quite a lot of additional bandwidth. Only 15 schools still depend on the original frame relay system, and three of those will be upgraded to T-1s or better within the month, and a fourth, Russell elementary, is slated for demolition. 

The wireless system consists of a mix of FCPS-purchased towers and routing, as well as a tower leased from WIN Enterprises atop the Central Bank office tower - the "Big Blue Building." It is the intent of the Office of Educational Technology to have all schools on a T-1 (1.5 meg) or better connection by the beginning of the next school year. As much of that capability as possible will be provided through purchased, rather than leased, wireless connectivity, which is limited only by line-of-sight.

CO began using a Microsoft network monitoring program with graphic representation - Visio Network Management - before all the changes. Visio is no longer supported by Microsoft, and CO quit updating the Visio displays last year. Hence, the graphics display utilized in this collection of pages does not reveal the current complexity of the system. However, if you run your mouse over any school or district location, a pop-up will reveal the current status of data routing to/from that site, or a clickable link will take you to a more detailed display.