VTel Announces Vision for Rural Vermont Schools  

VTel reinforces a long standing commitment to rural Vermont schools and offers three free years of 4G/LTE broadband connectivity to local Springfield School District, who is seeking a $500,000 grant to improve distance learning capacity within the high school

(Springfield, VT) – May 18^th, 2011 – Inspired by a recent collaboration with the Springfield School District, VTel announced that it is encouraging twelve Vermont school systems to seek grant opportunities and apply for $500,000 grant funding each, to innovate with integration of free laptops, high speed wireless, fiber, video conferencing, and remote data storage.

“A statewide influx of funding allocated for Distance Learning and Teleconferencing could be game changing for the many schools that are working with the realities of smaller budgets and bigger classes,” said Tess Gauthier, VTel’s Community Broadband Team Director.  “Distance Education with huge bandwidth capacity will enable school systems to leverage more out of every budget dollar, while maintaining the high quality of public education that Vermont is so well known for.”

VTel is encouraging other school systems to partner in the proposal process and learn form Springfield School District’s best practices. VTel is not the source of the grant funding nor is it able to guarantee the success of any application for funds, but is happy to support rural innovators.

“Nearly every VTel executive went to school in rural Vermont”, said Michel Guite VTel’s founder and owner.  “We are excited to play a small role in helping Vermont innovate its schools, particularly those in rural areas”.

A key part of the application is that three free years of VTel wireless broadband could be contributed as VTel’s Wireless Open World (WOW) 4G/LTE state of the art, high speed, wireless broadband network deploys in many areas of the state.

Last year, VTel achieved the humbling honor of being awarded over $130 million in federal funds implement WOW, which will extend the company’s existing 1,400 mile fiber network and also enable the deployment of a 4G/LTE high speed, wireless broadband network in Vermont’s most underserved areas.  Through WOW, many Vermonters who presently do not have any access to high-speed Internet will be able to get a high-speed connection.

A few weeks ago, VTel completed a green data center in Wallingford, equipped with redundant off-site data storage for schools.  More recently VTel supported a $500,000 grant application with Springfield School District to provide a free laptop to every student, with free VTel wireless broadband, integrated into VTel fiber.