E-rate | Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise

The E-rate program gives every American school and library the opportunity to address their networking and telecommunications challenges by offsetting the total acquisition cost of networking technologies and services. It’s time to do more with your Category 2 budget.

Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise has been an E-rate provider since its inception in 1998, with expertise to help you plan, determine product eligibility, and status. Our cost-effective products and solutions have allowed our customers to get the most out of advanced communications.

Enable 21st century teaching and learning:

Deploy high performance Wi-Fi
Benefit from low latency Ethernet switches
Implement policy-based security
Leverage automation for efficiency

Transform your school district

Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise web refresh education topic2 image

Wi-Fi untethers network access to make any space a learning space. Alcatel-Lucent OmniAccess Stellar Wi-Fi gives districts a high performance, controller-less architecture with sophisticated management features that enables 1:1 learning, hybrid teaching, and HyFlex.

A reliable Wi-Fi solution requires a solid LAN. The Alcatel-Lucent OmniSwitch family of Ethernet switches provides a network foundation that is high performance, low latency, highly available, secure and built on carrier technology capable of sub-second failover.

School districts must also secure their assets through implementation of a multi-layer network security strategy for protection against ransomware and other cyberthreats. OmniSwitches add additional layers of security by using policy based network access to provide granular control.

K-12 technology directors also need to rely on automation to support their network infrastructure. Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise’s OmniSwitch families have sophisticated automation features such as Intelligent Fabric and 802.1aq (SPB) to streamline deployment, reduce error and help your directors accomplish more with their limited staff.

We were facing real challenges with an outdated network and an antiquated phone system. We were therefore extremely fortunate to partner with ALE to develop both short and long-term goals which addressed all of our challenges.

Mike Anderson, Director of Technology, Rockville Centre School District

Customer Benefits

How do we help education customers?

Sharing knowledge: Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise’s 20 years of E-rate experience can help you extend your budget and receive the full E-rate benefits to your K-12 institution. Build a plan that is cognizant of product eligibility, status and technology to make your E-rate dollars go further.

Developing partnerships: A healthy vendor relationship during and after the E-rate process gets the most out of your budget and fulfils the needs of your students and faculty. We’ve built our whole business model on cooperative partnerships that support you beyond E-Rate season. We’re in the business of making education…and business…personal.

Leading technology: Efficient and cost-effective wired and wireless technology help stretch your E-rate funds.

High performance networking: Build a future proof network with LAN and Wi-Fi that supports 100 Gb/s and multi-gig ports. Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise networks feature IEEE 802.1aq (SPB) technology that enables all uplinks to transmit traffic and sub-second failover to eliminate Spanning Tree port blocking.

Centralized network management: Platforms that feature wizards to check configuration, create security policies and reduce errors are required for both physical and cloud-based deployment.
Alcatel-Lucent OmniVista 2500 and cloud-based OmniVista Cirrus, feature “one pane of glass” Wi-Fi and LAN management, and enable E-rate eligible managed services.

Automatic enablement: Accomplish more with OmniSwitches that support a wide variety of network automation standards (such as SDN and Python scripting), and Intelligent Fabric that automatically enables rapid network switch deployment and configuration (including OSPF).

Advanced Wi-Fi: OmniAccess Stellar Wi-Fi eliminates the controller bottleneck in your Wi-Fi network by decoupling management from the data path. It also enables mesh design installation without cabling.

Hardened switches: OmniSwitches and OmniAccess Stellar access points turn any space into a learning space by providing network access to outdoor locations, such as athletic fields and green spaces.