“Our legacy phone system was failing us and the investment required to build a new system was essentially a non-starter,” Sean Jameson, chief technology officer at Sarah Lawrence College, says.

And since Lightpath Hosted Voice had already completed trials in a campus department, the college’s implementation of a 1,000-seat cloud-based voice system was a “no-brainer,” Jameson adds. The expansion is slated to begin this summer.

This is not the first education sector rollout for Lightpath. Back in December, it announced it had connected more than 65 New Jersey schools and school districts. That was part of the state’s Department of Education’s Digital Readiness for Learning and Assessment Project (DRLAP).

Pricing, features and infrastructure were other factors in the Sarah Lawrence decision, according to its CTO. “We quickly started to see the flexibility that a cloud-based system can bring, especially around unprecedented mobility that improves how our staff communicates and powers our BC/DR efforts,” Jameson says.

He adds that competing approaches required the school to either have staff that could manage the system or pay “exorbitant fees every time a change was needed.” Jameson also points out that Lightpath monitors and maintains the service, and allows users to make changes on their own as deciding features: “Our users can easily make changes on their own via a Web portal and the pricing structure entitles us to a regular refresh of phones. When it came to our needs, Lightpath was able to tick every box.”

Lightpath is a division Cablevision, and offers Ethernet-based data, Internet, voice, video transport and managed services to businesses across the New York metro area. Its network reportedly extends more than 5,800 route miles connecting more than 7,000 fiber-lit locations. The company calls out its customer service as a key service feature, and points to its commendation by the New York State Public Service Commission for the last 17 consecutive years for “excellence in service and quality.”