Cannon School leads esports boom with Spectrum Enterprise fiber

“I had the notification email, I had the line, I had everything tested within two weeks. I’ve never had a better installation than the one I had with Spectrum Enterprise.”

Tram Tran, Manager of Information Technology, Cannon School

At Cannon School in Concord, North Carolina, esports has become a tool for raising spirits and building collaboration among its high school students. To encourage participation and better compete with other schools, the school increased its available bandwidth with the installation of Spectrum Enterprise fiber solutions.

“For us, esports is a place of belongingness,” says Tram Tran, Manager of Information Technology, Cannon School. “It’s about students having fun, doing something they enjoy. And for those students who say: ‘I want to do more. I want to compete,’ we have a program for them, too.”

Tran, who is also director of the esports program at Cannon School, said the school selected Spectrum Enterprise because it needed internet connectivity that was consistent, secure and reliable.

With Dedicated Fiber Internet (DFI), Spectrum Enterprise installed a solution that met all of the school’s needs. It is scalable, ready to expand in capacity to meet what Tran expects to be a continued surge of participation over the next few years.

Cannon School has also partnered with Spectrum Enterprise in securing its network with unified threat management that includes a firewall, advanced malware protection, intrusion prevention and content filtering. This protects the school’s IT infrastructure from unwanted intrusions such as data theft and ransomware attacks, and at the same time allows for content filtering on campus. The unified threat management package is a central feature of Managed Network Edge.

Content filtering is important as the high school shares its internet services with the lower grades at Cannon School. Tran needs to be able to block those websites deemed to have harmful content and limit access to other sites to age-appropriate students. Having simple and intuitive content filtering makes this easy.

“It’s a managed solution, which means Spectrum Enterprise manages the security aspect while we control the content filtering,” he explains. “Combined with our own endpoint detection and response system, I have confidence in the firewall and the people working behind it.”