Fiber and Voice for California Schools and Districts

Symmetric, dedicated fiber on our vast statewide network, engineered for K-12 districts and four-year universities — sized for state testing windows and built to keep classrooms, campuses, and learning platforms online.

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Education runs on the network.

School districts across the Central Valley run more of the school day online every year — cloud learning platforms, 1:1 device programs, digital curriculum, and state assessments that put every student on the network at the same time. When a connection drops or saturates, instruction stops with it.

Vast Networks delivers symmetric, dedicated fiber over a statewide backbone we own, sized per campus and engineered around the academic calendar. Our California-based engineers work directly with district IT teams on E-Rate eligible builds, and our 24/7 NOC keeps every site monitored from first bell through summer school.

Engineered for the work.

The capabilities our education customers rely on every day.

Dedicated campus bandwidth

Symmetric circuits sized per site, so a full computer lab and the front office each get the capacity they need.

State testing readiness

Capacity engineered for assessment windows when every student is online at once.

District-wide voice

Hosted PBX with paging, bell schedules, and emergency notification across every campus.

E-Rate friendly procurement

Category One eligible services with billing built for district business offices.

A starting point, engineered to fit.

The services education customers deploy most — every build is designed around your sites, bandwidth, and redundancy.

Dedicated Fiber

Symmetric dedicated circuits sized for testing windows and LMS traffic.

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Hosted PBX

Campus voice with emergency paging and bell integration.

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SIP Trunking

Scalable, district-wide calling across every site.

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Reliability you can build on.

Owned infrastructure and local engineering — not a reseller routing you offshore.

Privately owned fiber

5,000+ miles of underground fiber engineered in California.

Carrier-grade uptime SLA

Financially-backed service levels on every dedicated circuit.

24/7 local NOC

Monitored around the clock by California-based engineers.

California backbone

Low-latency routes across the Central Valley and statewide.

Education connectivity questions

How much bandwidth does a school district actually need?

The honest answer is that it depends far more on how the district uses the network than on enrollment alone. A useful starting point is per-student concurrent load during the heaviest hour of the year — usually a state assessment window with a 1:1 device program in full use — rather than an average school day, which understates the peak badly. We size against that peak and leave headroom, because a circuit that is comfortable in October and saturated in April was never sized correctly.

Are these services E-Rate eligible?

Dedicated internet access and lit fiber transport are Category One services, and we support districts through the process with the documentation, pricing, and SPIN details needed for Form 470 and Form 471 filings. Eligibility is decided by USAC against the district’s own filing, not by us — what we can do is make sure the paperwork and the service description are correct and arrive on time.

Can every campus in a district run on one network?

Yes, and it is usually the better design. Private point-to-point paths between campuses and the district office keep internal traffic — student information systems, backups, cameras, voice — off the public internet, and let the district apply filtering and egress policy at one place rather than at every site. Internet access is then a separate, correctly sized circuit rather than something each campus solves alone.

What happens during state testing windows?

That is the week the network is judged, so it gets planned for specifically. We size capacity against the assessment peak rather than the daily average, and the circuit is monitored around the clock so a problem during a testing window is noticed by our NOC rather than reported by a proctor. Districts that tell us their testing calendar in advance get better outcomes than districts that do not.

Can the phone system handle bell schedules and emergency notification?

Hosted PBX covers bell schedules, overhead and multicast paging, intercom, and site-wide notification, and the deployment accounts for the dispatchable-location and direct-911-dialing requirements that apply to school phone systems. These are design decisions best made before install rather than retrofitted afterwards, so we walk through them with district IT during scoping.

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