The Village of Glenview
Company Background
The Village of Glenview suffered serious technology problems, which wasn't allowing it to embrace the new Internet technology of the 21st Century. During 2002-2005, the Village realized its Technology Department suffered from a lack of direction in infrastructure, technology visioning and deployment. Roadblocks stopping advancement were caused by aging equipment and sobsolete technologies, which resulted in driving costs up.
Business Challenge
Although the Village of Glenview had traditional lines of communication between its locations, costs were rapidly rising due to new facilities coming online.
Monthly recurring costs were draining city coffers.
One key location had an obsolete "rogue phone system," which was not standard with the rest of the Village. That location even had its own phone numbers that required dialing out to the public phone system. This separate phone system was costing many thousands of dollars in yearly maintenance costs.
In addition, older network core switches were both obsolete and non-reliable. Redundant equipment was stressing electrical circuitry to its breaking point.
The Solution
In 2006, Enterprise Technology Associates was called in to source replacement equipment in order to leverage newer increases in speed and security.
In addition, the new facility needed to be linked to the existing network by specifying a wireless point-to-point transmitter.
In order to reach the Village's objectives, fiber within the new facility was extended to a campus building 400 feet away leveraging existing fiber infrastructure. New cell towers that were one mile away offered mounting points for point-to-point wireless, which was 75 times faster than the old system. The newest building was linked to the network using wireless transmission capable of supporting all the necessary features of data and telephone. To complete the project, servers were moved out of old data facilities with failing cooling units to more appropriate quarters.
The Result
The project took six months to complete. Enterprise Technology Associates was able to connect all of the Village of Glenview's nine buildings to the new system. The result was a more tightly integrated Wide Area Network using both traditional and Village-owned out-of-band wireless technologies. The number of required T1 lines was reduced from eight to five, thereby eliminating monthly recurring costs by $1,000 per month. The network speed was now 75 times faster than before creating user satisfaction. The Wide Area Network allowed for the extension of an existing VoIP system, which resulted in reducing the yearly maintenance on an obsolete phone system by $18,000 per year.