A Stitch in Time Kajeet uses Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile and US Cellular to
provide school bus Wi-Fi hotspots and has known the 3G sunset was coming for years. Michael Flood, the com- pany’s senior vice president and general manager for education, added that unforeseen complications were avoided by being proactive and employing an aggres- sive replacement program to make sure 2,500 education clients across the U.S., Canada and the United Kingdom were up to speed. “We have zero [customers] that are still on 3G,” Flood announced. “We started making sure everybody was upgraded a long time ago. We stopped selling 3G-only devices over two years ago. For the ones that were already out there, we’ve been aggressively working on replacing over the past two years. We replaced the last ones about 10 months ago.” Meanwhile, First Student worked with Zonar, which
leveraged AT&T 3G for telematics and GPS data. “We had about an 18-month runway to get this scheduled,” Scott Gulbransen, senior director of communications for First Group America, said by email. “We updated all of our
vehicles with an appropriate LTE solution before [the] deadline.”
Anna Lam, the communications specialist for Na-
tional Express Corporation, reported similar results by getting an early start with AT&T, T-Mobile, Bell Mobility and Verizon. Lam relayed that NEC had worked with the carriers over the past two years to “identify and upgrade the appropriate” devices. “We are actually complete with this effort for several
vendors and are wrapping up a small number of the re- maining devices in the next few months,” she wrote via email. Lam added that because of proactive efforts and in working with their carriers, “we have not yet experi- enced any glitches in this regard.”
Vendor Partners Are Critical While the majority of school districts that depended
on the 3G network have been upgraded, they and their vendors said the process taught them valuable lessons to pass along to districts that have yet to upgrade. The consensus was to find a trustworthy vendor that will take the time to get to know current and future needs and
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