Hammond School

At a Glance

• Organization: Hammond School

• Challenge: Existing hosted voice solution was unreliable, too costly, and didn’t meet the school's needs.

• Solution: Switched to net2phone Unite, a uCaaS solution that adapts to the school’s specific needs.

• Result: Dependable campus communications at a lower cost, backed by 24/7 support. .

About Hammond School

• Sector: Education

• Location: Columbia, SC

• School Size ~ 1000 students

Hammond School is an independent PreK–12 college preparatory day school in Columbia, South Carolina, serving approximately 1,000 students with a faculty and staff of 158 people. With daily communication among students, faculty, staff, and parents across campus, reliable telephony is central to how Hammond operates.

The Challenge: The voice solution that was holding Hammond back

Like many schools navigating aging or underperforming telecom infrastructure, Hammond found itself constrained by its provider, Segra, and its hosted voice solution.

Persistent problems included:

• Reliability issues disrupted day-to-day communications across the campus, including staff coordination, administrative operations, and parent communications.
• The cost was not justified by the level of service and uptime delivered by the Segra platform.
• Lack of flexibility and education-specific features made the solution a poor fit for a campus environment

The Solution: Why net2phone was the right fit for a PreK-12 campus

After dealing with reliability issues and an overpriced contract, Director of IT David Pfaehler set out to find a provider that understood the demands of a school campus. Following an evaluation of available options, Hammond School selected net2phone Unite as its new communications platform.

Three factors stood out in the decision:

PreK-12 Industry Experience

net2phone brought demonstrated experience serving K-12 institutions, a critical factor for Hammond. Schools have distinct communication requirements: bell schedules, multi-campus routing, emergency notification needs, and strict budget cycles. net2phone's familiarity with these demands gave Hammond School's IT leadership confidence that the solution would fit their environment from day one.

Call Path Model

A key technical differentiator was net2phone's Call Path Model, which offered Hammond School a more flexible and cost-aligned approach to call routing and capacity. Rather than paying for rigid per-seat structures that didn't align with how a school communicates, the Call Path Model provided a better fit, both operationally and financially.

Dedicated Support

Support was a deciding factor after Hammond's frustrating experience with its previous provider. net2phone's commitment to responsive, knowledgeable support tailored to the needs of educational institutions gave David Pfaehler and his team the assurance that help would be available when it mattered most.

net2phone has saved us a substantial amount of money each month while providing our business with the ability to make changes to the system quickly and get units repaired.
- David Pfaehler, Hammond School

Capabilities and Enhancements: A new standard for campus communications

With net2phone, Hammond School gained a modern communications platform with capabilities its previous solution could not provide:

• Flexible Call Routing via Call Path Model: Rather than paying for a dedicated line per staff member, Hammond School now shares a pool of lines across the campus, keeping costs in line with how the school really communicates.
• Platform Adaptable for Education: Access to features that support the unique scheduling, routing, and notification needs of a school campus.
• Scalable UCaaS Platform: A cloud-based unified communications foundation that can grow and adapt alongside Hammond School's needs. 

The Impact: Reliable, cost-effective communications

By moving to net2phone Unite, Hammond School replaced an unreliable, costly hosted solution with a platform that fits the way their school’s specific needs.

✅Reliability restored: Eliminated disruptions to staff coordination, admin operations, and parent communication.

✅ Lower total cost: The switch delivered meaningful savings and better service over previous provider

✅ A true education partner: Hammond's IT team now has a communications partner that understands the demands of a school campus.

Conclusion

Hammond School came to net2phone with a clear goal: replace an unreliable, overpriced system with one that adapts to the way the school operates. net2phone Unite delivered dependable campus communications at a lower cost, backed by a team that understands the education sector.