Fellowship Academy is a private school serving more than 350 students and 50 teachers, from pre-K to 12th grade, in the greater Fort Worth area. The school has a 14-acre campus with a 33,000 sq ft main building and plans to add two new buildings soon.
“The building we’re in today was built around 13 years ago, with five Wi-Fi access points [APs],” says Mark Robinson, Technology Manager at Fellowship Academy. “Then around eight years ago we upgraded to 11 APs, but the building only had five dedicated lines for them, so our infrastructure was being heavily taxed every day.”
With one eye on those future expansion plans, Mark also had to take into account the current reality for his users where some classes had to take turns having internet access so they wouldn’t cause the whole network to crash. With the overall situation in mind, Mark started looking at his options.
With Meter, there are no small fish
Mark reached a tipping point when he says he started feeling like “a small fish in a big pond” after an international company bought his previous networking provider, and the customer service started to suffer.
Where he needed proactive monitoring and management of his infrastructure, he got a convoluted ticketing process that led to awkward conversations with teachers who just needed the internet to work in their classrooms. Rather than helping his students and teachers, Mark was distracted by constant troubleshooting and firefighting. Mark and his staff deserved a better system to support them.
“When Meter came in and said that they worked with other private schools, I knew that we would no longer be that small fish. And you have indeed given us the attention we needed and have helped us out a lot.” Mark Robinson Technology Manager, Fellowship Academy
Now, rather than sending a ticket into the void and waiting, Mark gets 24/7 monitoring and access to his Meter dashboard where he gets real-time information on the status of his infrastructure. And on the off chance that an issue arises, he knows Meter will reach out immediately with an alert, followed by a plan of action to get it back up and running.
“Working with Meter, I know we’ll get the attention we need,” says Mark, continuing, “I’ve already experienced that with the installation process and roll-out. I know Meter has my back.”
Once he opened up Fellowship Academy for “back-to-school,” Mark’s hunch proved correct.
“The network is running wonderfully. Now that internet access is no longer an issue, most of my time is spent retraining staff and students on their device capabilities,” says Mark. No longer the small fish, Mark can spend his time further enriching the student and staff experience.
Meter’s proactive monitoring allows for more focused attention
This focused attention is one of the things Mark says he’s most excited about is getting back to giving to his students and teachers when they need it. Rather than spending all his time troubleshooting his network and waiting for a resolution from his previous provider, with Meter’s proactive monitoring, alerts, and automated fixes, he can instead schedule sit-downs with teachers and administrators to learn about their specific technology needs and work out plans to address them.
“Meter has eliminated so much of the stress of my job. I’m saving 2-3 hours a day without troubleshooting network issues.” Mark Robinson
He’s also seen those teachers and administrators getting more work done, experiencing much faster performance with lower latency now that Meter has installed 52 access points and all new switches throughout campus. Recounting his last network provider, “when you’ve got 15 students in a classroom trying to access the same resource, and only half can get on at a time, it definitely impacts their learning experience,” Mark relates. “Teachers can already dedicate more instructional time to our students with our new, more robust network. We recently completed our fall online testing and it went smoothly without any internet issues.”
Meter’s Network as a Service model is all-inclusive
Before Meter, the network infrastructure at Fellowship Academy was a hodge-podge of hardware. “Some of our switches dated to when the building opened 13 years ago,” Mark tells us. The rest were installed by their previous networking provider, which meant he could access some, but not all, of his network infrastructure for updates or troubleshooting.
“Now that we're live with Meter,” Mark says, “I'm sitting here looking at the dashboard knowing that I'm getting real-time information that I can pass on to my administration and teachers. Knowing that Meter is going to know about any problems before I do takes so much burden off of me and enables me to communicate better to the people I'm supporting.”
According to Mark, “When Meter said they would work with us for no upfront cost, it was a no-brainer.” The lowest quote he had received for hardware alone was more than $39,000, and he adds, “That was nowhere near as robust a build-out as what Meter has given us.”
“Meter gets an easy 10 out of 10.” Mark Robinson
Working with Meter was an even more pleasant experience than Mark had expected. As he describes it, “There were no stupid questions. Every question I asked was met with a clear, easy-to-understand answer. The professionalism and deep networking knowledge of the Meter team is top-notch.”
For more information on how to put Meter to work on your school’s Network as a Service needs, reach out to our team of experts today.