THE SITUATION

Farmington Public Schools had obsolete analog phones with limited functionality and flexibility, and substantial monthly maintenance expenses. Administrators were looking for a solution to acquire new technology with reasonable ongoing costs.

THE APPROACH

Mr. Matthew Ross, Director of Technology for Farmington Public Schools, and Farmington Board of Education managers worked with Genie Innovations, Inc. (IP Genie) and its partners, the Capitol Region Council of Governments (CRCOG) and the Connecticut Center for Advanced Technology (CCAT), to engineer a system that would address the school’s technology and budget requirements. Based on their needs, IP Genie implemented a Genie Premise 1,000-line PBX with High Availability (which included complete telephony redundancy), utilized the school’s existing high-speed fiberoptic Connecticut Education Network (CEN) connection; and installed 600 IP telephones in 10 schools with intra-district, 4-digit dialing capabilities.

THE OUTCOME

IP Genie was able to upgrade Farmington’s outdated telephone systems with top-tier, flexible, reliable and secure telephony that meets their needs for years to come with substantial ongoing costs savings.

The IP Genie system:

• Added convenience and productivity features including Caller ID, Voicemail to Email, Conferencing, an easy Greeting Change mode, and building-to-building paging capabilities
• Improved call quality with high-definition voice telephone calls
• Significantly reduced ongoing vendor expenses with self PBX administration for easy in-house “adds, moves and changes” requests
• Reduced long-distance dialing costs
• Provided failover protection in the event of power outages

The Farmington Public Schools project is considered one of the largest, state-of-the-art Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) systems in the state.