Managed Wireless, K-12 Education, Network

What’s a Co-Managed Internal Broadband Approach for School Districts?

Chaz Hager September 18 2024

No matter where students are in their day, your school districts’ Wi-Fi and network connectivity can either support and even transform learning—or hinder it. From online testing and curriculums to integrated learning and an increased volume in devices, your district’s network environment is complex. This is especially true for middle and high schools, where every 50 minutes, students are on the move again—and need their educational devices to work wherever they sit down for class next.

Of course, budgets—and internal staff resources—are tight. So how do you plan for upgrades now while accounting for the long-term stability and strategy of your infrastructure and classroom networks? How do you stay on top of network maintenance to extend the ROI of your network infrastructure? And if you’re looking to invest in technology, should you take the leap and buy the current technology now or hold out and wait for newer technology? How do you do all of this while managing E-Rate and Title 1 funding cycles? 

This is where a Co-Managed Internal Broadband Approach—a category of service on the E-Rate Eligible Services List (ESL) and a partnership model designed for school districts—can help.  

What is a Co-Managed Internal Broadband Approach?

Managed Services is a broad term, technically defined as the practice of outsourcing business administration and management responsibilities to a third party.  

Within the E-Rate Eligible Services, Managed Internal Broadband Services (MIBS) refers to services provided by a third party for the operation, management, and monitoring of internal connections components.  

These services include managing eligible products such as access points, routers, switches, hubs, and wiring. These must be located at the applicant site and necessary to transport information to classrooms or publicly accessible areas of a library.  

MIBS is one of the two service types under E-Rate's Category 2 Services, the other being Basic Maintenance of Internal Connections (BMIC). BMIC covers the repair and upkeep of eligible internal connections, including hardware, wiring, and cable maintenance, along with basic technical support and configuration changes. 

Co-Managed MIBS is a Collaborative Partnership—Not a Replacement for Your IT Team 

As with any successful collaboration, each partner brings their own expertise to the table, joining forces to create or achieve something greater than what may have been possible on their own. When you work with a great MIBS partner through a co-managed approach, this is what you can expect. You and your team are the experts on your educational business, while your MIBS partner is focused on co-managing wired, wireless, and accompanying services.  

Within the E-Rate categorization, MIBS refers to these services—it is not a personnel replacement program. A MIBS partner will co-design the services agreement for your networking needs. They’ll step in alongside you or your IT team to provide expert support where it’s needed most. This could include services such as: 

  • Network Assessment Monitoring  

  • Network Design and Collaborative Futureproofing  

  • Break-Fix  

  • Configuration Backups and Restoration  

  • Additions, Moves, and Changes for Network Expansions and New Technologies  

  • Installation 

  • Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly and Annual Reporting  

  • Guidance and Training for Staff  

Co-Managed MIBS Means You Maintain Visibility into Your Infrastructure, But Gain Access to Added Expertise 

An external MIBS partner who has managed networks for many clients and K-12 districts brings in a deep bench of expertise and experience in managing, upgrading, and maintaining school networks, for a manageable, predictable cost. They’ll know what pitfalls to avoid and what makes a network plan agile—as well as how to best maximize your E-Rate dollars for now and the future.  

This approach is extremely popular for school districts, as well as businesses of all sizes—from small and medium-sized businesses all the way up to large enterprise organizations. Worldwide, the market for managed services is expected to surpass $400 billion by 2026. Specifically, for MIBS Category 2 Services, there are 4000 School Districts leveraging these services currently, a number that continues to grow.  

Access to a team of experts, for a monthly, manageable cost, is a big reason for the model’s success. Internally, there may be times when the budget allows for hiring highly specialized staff. Yet the issue with this strategy is that many times, it can be expensive and difficult to not only find high-skilled talent, but to retain them as well. When internal staff leave the district, the re-hiring cycle increases costs even more, as the district must then spend time, resources, and money to recruit and retrain replacements more often.

With co-managed services, you gain access to expert staff without being the sole bearer of the high salary costs and the risks of rapid turnover. Instead, your MIBS partner empowers district staff through ongoing knowledge transfer. A co-managed MIBS approach means they’re your partner, and an extension of your IT team.  

When it comes to managing your network, it also means you maintain visibility and control over all parts of your network infrastructure; you’re not handing over the reins and losing access. You and your team still make all the decisions and directions. Your MIBS partner is there to guide, design, provide, and maintain real-time SLAs for your district—and help deliver a best-in-class experience for your end users.  

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A Co-Managed Approach Can Help You Move from Reactive to Proactive, So You Can Deliver the Best User Experience 

With a co-managed services partner, you’ll maintain access to your current network monitoring tools and control over your entire educational environment.  

While monitoring is important, even the best monitoring technology cannot help your district shift from managing reactively to proactively alone. If you’re like most districts, you or your IT staff are so busy wearing so many hats, you don’t have time to sit down to plan or assess insights from your current situation. For some districts, managing the monitoring tools itself is a task your team doesn’t have the time or training for.  

When you find the right co-MIBS partner for your district, they can give your team the data it needs to operate proactively at a consistent cost, creating more satisfied students, faculty, administrators and an overall better user experience.   

This means that you know your network needs are constantly being monitored, maintained, updated, and protected.  

This is critical, because while they may float under the radar as you move from fire to fire, missing routine maintenance activities can cause severe long-term damage—much like missing routine maintenance on your car. When the fundamentals aren’t taken care of, they lead to issues that include downtime across the school, compliance issues, cybersecurity vulnerabilities, and data loss. It’s why the maintenance part of networking is just as—if not more—important than technology purchasing and upgrading.  

A MIBS partner can help you stay on top of all of it, helping you move to a proactive maintenance cadence as well as providing training and professional development, so your staff can use your monitoring tools effectively. 

A Co-Managed Approach Helps You Manage the Now, While Planning for Innovation 

Whether it’s from students, teachers, or administrators, complaints about the Wi-Fi not working tend to be the loudest—and most frequent.  

A great MIBS partner takes responsibility to solve for this, helping assess your network and make a plan that takes into consideration your current needs while also creating a system that’s scalable and flexible.  

With some of the burden on your staff alleviated, this may mean you're able to focus on more strategic initiatives. And for their part, your MIBS partner can help you envision and execute networking solutions to inspire creativity, innovation, and inspired learning within your classrooms.

While you bring your own insight from your end users, you can lean on them to be experts on new and emerging technology, and to bring ideas from their work with other schools. Technology changes quickly, and depending on the device, hardware has a typical lifespan of three to five years. With the right MIBS partner, you can lean on experts for new and emerging technology, leading testing, prototypes, execution, and analysis. Allowing them to manage vendor and partner relationships frees you up to excel at all the other parts of your job. Having a MIBS partner on your bench will also assist with the knowledge transfer of new technology for your staff, helping you saving on training costs.   

Co-Managed Truly Means a Collaborative Partnership 

Just think about being able to turn those complaints about Wi-Fi into excitement from teachers who can trust the Wi-Fi enough to reliably plan integrative lessons, with inclusive technology for their students. Or what it would mean for you and your staff, no matter your size, to have something freed up off your plate, while gaining cost-effective access to a team of wired and wireless networking experts. All while you still maintain control of and visibility into your IT infrastructure, as well as all decision-making.  

Finally, thanks to flexible services agreements, collaborating with a MIBS partner enables consistent long-term planning for your district’s budget cycles—especially crucial as we enter the final year (Year 5) of the E-Rate Funding Cycle. Through a MIBS partnership, you can shift much of your district’s IT budget to an operational expense, all but eliminating large capital expenses and incremental costs.   

Looking to understand how to make the most of your E-Rate funding this year?  Download our Guide: How to Maximize Your E-Rate Dollars 

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