Case Study: Mississippi Bend Area Education Agency achieves a simpler, more resilient network with IP Pathways

Mississippi Bend Area Education Agency serves 49,500 students with IP Pathways

The Mississippi Bend Area Education Agency (MBAEA) faced a challenge with its Fiber Consortium. As its bandwidth needs grew, its outdated, self-managed firewall and ISP infrastructure became overloaded and costly to maintain, leading to service issues for member schools. IP Pathways was engaged to find a more cost-effective and secure solution.

IP Pathways implemented a custom solution where it procures internet circuits for each school and provides a direct, private fiber connection to its data center. This bundled service includes a managed firewall and makes IP Pathways the single point of contact. The result eliminated the need for MBAEA to act as an ISP, significantly reduced network complexity and cost, and created a resilient privatized network. This infrastructure easily handled a massive surge in traffic during the shift to remote learning, with no additional costs. MBAEA has since expanded its partnership to leverage additional IP Pathways managed services.

Mississippi Bend Area Education Agency (mbaea)