South Orange County Community College District is part of the California Community College System, which serves over 35,000 students from two campuses: Saddleback College in the City of Mission Viejo, and Irvine Valley College in the City of Irvine.

In 1996, the district upgraded its college networks on both campuses after increasing the number of Internet workstations to over 1,700. Since then, the district had added nearly 1,300 more workstations, bringing the total to nearly 3,000. The network needed greater and more reliable bandwidth to handle this increase.

The school district partnered with Cox Business to provide high-speed Internet access through its fiber-optic network. After a year, however, the district wanted to offer more services to its schools. Cox Business smoothly transitioned the upgrade, which gave the district up to 10Mbps of bandwidth.

"Our Cox Business account and support team has been very responsive when we ask for changes, enhancements, or just call to kick around a few ideas," said Rick Van Leeuwen, Associate Director, Network Services. "There have even been times when their engineers have assisted us with identifying and correcting problems that were either in our network or another ISP."

The school district is very pleased with the reliable, high-quality Internet service provided by Cox Business. "They notify us well in advance of infrequent but necessary maintenance. The network is monitored 24/7 and if we notice something unusual and call, they are typically already looking into it," said Van Leeuwen.

Van Leeuwen also noted that the new service has given the district the flexibility to develop new Web-based programs for students and the community. "A student's entire experience with the colleges, from their first application to register through the first day of classes, can be accomplished entirely from the Internet. They never even have to set foot on campus," he explained. "And once they're on-campus, we provide an 'Internet-enriched' learning environment. Cox Business helps us to make that a reality.
"Cox Business continues to bring new opportunities for their services to our attention, and we have collaborated on possible solutions to telephone, video conferencing and VPN (Virtual Private Network)," he added. "Combine that with the technical support we receive, and one just couldn't ask for more."