St. Joseph’s Academy Bandwidth Improvement Case Study

This case study details the bandwidth improvement efforts at St. Joseph’s Academy, a private all-girls high school located in St. Louis, MO. The Academy, founded in 1840, faced a significant increase in bandwidth demand, necessitating an upgrade from a single fiber link and two cable links to three broadband cable links and a larger fiber connection. The need arose due to the implementation of a one-to-one laptop program for students, which required robust internet access for various online services, including streaming media and cloud storage. The IT department addressed this challenge by leveraging previously designated standby cable links, upgrading their Ecessa unit, and consolidating all links into a single active network. The result was enhanced WAN link load balancing, ensuring high availability and improved performance for online applications. The solution also provided efficient disaster recovery mechanisms and redundant internet connectivity, allowing uninterrupted communications and self-management of DNS and port forwarding.