St Columba College

The college

St Columba College is Australia's first joint Catholic and Anglican co-educational school, established in 1996 in Andrews Farm in Adelaide's northern suburbs. The college operates across three campuses — Junior School, Middle School and Senior School — all located along President Avenue, serving more than 1,600 students from Foundation to Year 12 with a staff of over 250.

With a $20 million campus expansion underway and a growing student population, the college's reliance on digital learning platforms, cloud-based curriculum tools and campus-wide communications has increased significantly year on year.

The problem

When Caznet first engaged with St Columba College, the school's technology infrastructure was stretched well beyond its limits.

Internet: The college's only internet connection was a 40 Mbps microwave link — a point-to-point wireless service that had reached its maximum capacity and could not be upgraded. With more than 1,600 students and 250 staff increasingly dependent on online platforms, 40 Mbps was nowhere near enough. Bandwidth contention during peak hours — when entire year levels were accessing digital learning resources simultaneously — was a daily problem.

Phone system: Communications ran on an ageing ISDN phone system powered by a large physical PBX mounted on the server room wall. The system was becoming unreliable, replacement parts were increasingly difficult to source, and managing handsets, extensions and call routing across three separate campuses was complex and time-consuming for the IT team.

Servers and email: All of the college's servers — file storage, Active Directory, applications — were housed in an on-site server room with no off-site redundancy. Email ran on a MDaemon mail server hosted on-premises, which lacked the modern functionality, scalability and security features that a school of this size required. Collaboration tools were limited, and there was no integrated platform for document sharing or remote access.

Campus connectivity: The three campuses had no high-speed interconnection. Moving data between sites was slow, and there was no unified network — each campus effectively operated in isolation.

What we did

Dark fibre ring connecting all three campuses

Caznet designed and deployed a dark fibre ring linking the Junior, Middle and Senior School campuses together with 10 Gbps dedicated capacity. A ring topology means that if a single fibre segment is damaged, traffic automatically re-routes in the opposite direction — providing built-in resilience without any single point of failure between sites.

This high-speed backbone unified the three campuses into a single network, giving students and staff seamless access to the same systems, storage and services regardless of which campus they're on.

High-capacity internet with backup

The 40 Mbps microwave link was replaced with a multi-gigabit fibre internet service — a step change in both speed and reliability. A separate NBN Business Internet connection was deployed as a backup, providing automatic failover if the primary circuit is ever interrupted.

The combination delivers the bandwidth needed for 1,600+ concurrent users accessing cloud platforms, streaming educational content, running video calls and submitting work online — with headroom for the college's continued growth.

Infrastructure as a Service and Microsoft 365

The college's on-premises servers were migrated to a hybrid model combining Caznet's data centre IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) with Microsoft 365.

Core infrastructure that needs to remain on-site — file servers, Active Directory, RADIUS authentication for Wi-Fi — stays on campus, connected to the data centre over the fibre ring. Everything else moved to the cloud:

• Microsoft 365 — Exchange Online replaced the legacy MDaemon mail server, giving staff and students modern email with enterprise-grade security, spam filtering and compliance. SharePoint and OneDrive provide document storage and collaboration. Microsoft Teams is used extensively for communication and classroom activities.
• IaaS — Virtualised server infrastructure hosted in Caznet's Adelaide data centre provides resilience, redundancy and scalability that an on-site server room cannot match — without the college needing to manage the underlying hardware.

Hosted phone system — 180+ handsets across three campuses

The ISDN PBX was decommissioned entirely. In its place, Caznet deployed a hosted PBX phone system with more than 180 handsets distributed across the Junior, Middle and Senior School campuses.

Because the phone system is hosted in the cloud and the campuses are connected by fibre, every handset operates as part of a single unified system. Call transfers between campuses are internal extensions — not external calls. Reception staff can see the status of any extension at any campus. Auto-attendants and call queues route parent and community enquiries to the right team regardless of which building they sit in.

Managing the system is dramatically simpler than the old ISDN PBX. Adding extensions, changing call flows and configuring out-of-hours routing is done through a web portal, not by a technician rewiring a physical switchboard.

The result

St Columba College now operates on an enterprise-grade network and communications platform that matches the scale and ambition of the school itself.

• 10 Gbps fibre ring connecting all three campuses into a single, resilient network
• Multi-gigabit internet with automatic NBN failover — replacing a 40 Mbps microwave link that couldn't be upgraded
• Hybrid cloud — Microsoft 365 for email, collaboration and productivity; IaaS for core infrastructure — eliminating the limitations and risk of a single on-site server room
• Modern hosted phone system — 180+ handsets managed as one system across three campuses, replacing an end-of-life ISDN PBX
• Room to grow — the platform scales with the college as it continues its $20 million campus expansion and growing student population

The college's IT team can now focus on supporting teaching and learning outcomes rather than maintaining ageing infrastructure. And with Caznet managing the connectivity, hosting and phone system as a single provider, there's one point of contact for everything — not a different vendor for every service.