Every day educators and students from more than 400 locations across Washington State have world-class educational resources at their fingertips, and every day they rely on the same network to access it.

In 1996, Washington legislators and educational leaders saw the Internet's potential to transform learning. To guarantee that students across the state would always have equal access to online courses, resources, programs and degrees, they passed a bill to create a single broadband network that would connect all educational institutions.

The project, dubbed the K-20 Education Network, required a network that was high-performing, cost-effective, secure, scalable and reliable. Six years after the bill was passed, Washington State has a fast and reliable network that connects 99.8 percent of the state's schools, community colleges, universities and libraries giving 1.5 million students access to the Internet and voice and videoconferencing services.

Today, elementary students embark on virtual fieldtrips to museums around the world, students isolated in rural areas join online training programs, medical professors attend conferences without leaving their home and advanced high school students get a head start on college degrees thanks to online courses offered in partnership with colleges

The Cisco solutions implemented, such as secure routers, optical switches and telepresence solutions, have developed with the program and grown to support a 5,000 percent increase in data traffic over the past 10 years.

To learn more about the K-20 Education Network and Cisco's solutions take a look at the detailed case study here.

Is your state keeping up with the technical times?