CASE STUDY

The Challenge: When Canceling 36 Lines Took Down Over 100

For years, Prosper ISD’s legacy phone lines carried mission-critical functions: fire alarms, fax lines, and 9-1-1 backup connectivity across a district serving roughly 30,000 students at 32 sites with more than 3,000 employees. As the district added schools and facilities at a relentless pace, those copper lines went from background utility to active liability.

The breaking point was an attempt to cancel 36 phone lines. Instead, more than 100 lines were disconnected, knocking out service across multiple sites and forcing staff to scramble to restore them. The lines came back for about six weeks, then went down for another two. “That was the final straw,” said Dan Lovitt, Telecom Systems Administrator for Prosper ISD. The daily toll was as real as the outages: “Every day was stressful because I always knew there was going to be an issue somewhere. When you ask them to fix one thing, they would break something else.”

The Turning Point: This Is Untenable

After repeated outages and service disruptions, the district decided to stop relying on legacy POTS lines altogether. “I was like, this is untenable. That’s when we started looking at different options,” Lovitt said. That search led Prosper to RCN Technologies’ POTS Link, a wireless-fueled POTS replacement service.

Why Prosper Chose RCN: Simple, Transparent, and Cost-Effective

The district evaluated alternatives briefly, but the decision came down to ease, transparency, and trust. The economics were straightforward: the total cost of equipment plus service was less than the district had been paying, and the break-even point came quickly. “It was very transparent. It was very easy. The cost was fantastic,” Lovitt said.

Implementation: I Didn’t Have to Babysit Anybody

For IT and facilities teams, the deployment experience matters almost as much as the product, especially across dozens of sites. RCN worked with the district to plan placements, account for antenna requirements, and coordinate roof penetrations where needed. Once the pattern was set, rollout became predictable. “Once you installed a couple of them, it was more of a lather, rinse, repeat,” Lovitt said.

Just as important, the project ran itself. “You guys came out and did what you were supposed to do, like grown adult professionals. I didn’t feel the need to babysit anybody. I didn’t have to chase people around.”

The Results: Dramatically Fewer Issues and Real Peace of Mind

After more than three years in service, Prosper reported only a handful of issues, compared with problems it had dealt with monthly. “I think we’ve had them for more than three years now, and we’ve maybe had two or three calls or issues at all in that time,” Lovitt said. “Before RCN, I would have problems every single month.”

The bigger change was visibility, and the stress that left with it. Instead of discovering a dead line only when someone tried to use it, the district now has proactive monitoring. “You guys are watching our lines. If something goes wrong, we know instantly. Those lines used to be one of the most stressful things I had to deal with, and now it’s barely on my radar.”

The Bottom Line

Prosper ISD replaced unreliable legacy POTS lines across a fast-growing, 32-site district with RCN’s POTS Link, trading monthly outages and constant firefighting for proactive monitoring, lower cost, and three-plus years of near-silence on what used to be a daily headache. For a district adding campuses every year, that is the difference between telecom as a risk and telecom as a non-issue.

Advice for Other School Districts

“Nothing’s going to get better. It’s only going to get worse. I could not recommend enough that they move away from old POTS lines and go with a company like RCN.”– Dan Lovitt, Telecom Systems Administrator, Prosper ISD