Case Study
A First-in-Nation Internet Plan: Murray School District
How Murray, Utah became the first district in the country to deliver private LTE over CBRS spectrum straight to students' homes — during a pandemic, with Utah's first 10-gigabit classrooms.
Murray School District has been operating for a hundred years in the Salt Lake Valley, serving 6,200 students and 800 staff across seven elementary schools, two middle schools, and a high school. The district had been treating home access as an equity problem rather than an IT problem well before the rest of the country was forced to.
IT Director Jason Eyre wanted connectivity for every student, and he was specific about which students that meant. A district can put a device in every hand and still leave a real portion of its enrollment unable to use it after the last bell. In lower-income homes the barriers were cost and shared bandwidth: either there was no service, or there was one connection carrying an entire household at once. When COVID-19 closed buildings, the gap between school and home stopped being a long-term equity project and became the entire delivery model.
Being first in the nation means there is no district to call for advice and no proven playbook to follow. Murray needed partners willing to build something without a precedent, on a pandemic timeline. Pine Cove and RUCKUS took it on together.
The work ran from the switches outward: the wired foundation rebuilt first, a SmartZone controller and LTE hardware deployed as the control layer for a private cellular network, next-generation RUCKUS radios secured during a period when hardware of any kind was difficult to source, access points placed on 10 apartment buildings where students actually live, and a 10 and 40 gigabit backbone — including some of the first 10-gigabit-to-the-desktop classrooms anywhere in Utah.
"Pine Cove is one of my most trusted vendors," Eyre says. "They are always quick to respond and they are helping our district be on the leading edge of technology." Murray became the first district in the country to deliver private LTE to its students' homes over CBRS spectrum. The practical effect: a student's ability to finish an assignment no longer depends on what their household can afford or how many people are online at once.
