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unsets have a new meaning for school dis- tricts since 2019 and have defied convention by occurring in the north, south, east, and west—any direction where school districts
receive critical student transportation data from a 3G network offered by AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile or Verizon. Just as meteorologists predict daily sunset times, these powerhouse carriers have set dates when their 3G networks will fade into the sunset and will no longer be available. AT&T was the first carrier to void its 3G network on Feb. 22. Sprint followed suit on March 31. T-Mobile has scheduled its 3G sunset for July 1, with Verizon shutting down its 3G operations by Dec. 31. Some school districts acted immediately to begin
upgrading their equipment to 4G or 5G technology, to continue receiving data such as GPS, student tracking, telematics, camera systems, and in some cases, Wi-Fi. Other school districts, however, acted not so quickly for a variety of reasons tied mostly to opportunity, cost and purchasing policies that slowed the procurement process. Those districts with cumbersome procure- ment procedures and those that decided there was no hurry were blind-sided by the onslaught of the COVID-19 virus that severely crippled an already vul- nerable global supply chain.
Turning a Negative Into a Positive Herbert Byrd said transportation administrators at
Virginia’s Chesapeake Public Schools were unfazed in late 2019 when a Zonar representative advised the dis- trict to upgrade its GPS and other on-board systems. “To be honest, we said we’d get around to it,” admitted the district’s assistant director of transportation. Then COVID-19 hit, and the district shut its schools in March 2020. But instead of ducking for cover like many of their counterparts around the country, opportunistic Chesapeake officials used the downtime to their ad- vantage. Byrd said the district installed new BusPatrol surveillance cameras across the fleet and upgraded the telecommunications network to a 4G system with no interruption of service. He called it a “no-brainer.” “We said, let’s get the ball rolling,” Byrd recalled. “We used the pandemic to our advantage as far as upgrading to the 4G system.” Byrd said staff notified Zonar, which sent the replace-
ment equipment immediately. District personnel installed the new technology. Byrd said the installs were expedited because the buses were stationary. Mechanics drove to the
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