Wireless Networking - Erith School
Customer: Erith School
Location: Bexley, North West Kent
Requirements: Cost effective WiFi solution, capable of high-density performance
Equipment: Managed Indoor Access Points and Outdoor Access Points
The Requirement
Erith is a large Secondary school in the London Borough of Bexley with some 2,000 pupils and staff with ages ranging from 11-18. Located on the fringes of North West Kent, it is a specialised Sports, Mathematics and Computing Academy which stresses high academic achievement.
Erith School had an HP Wi-Fi solution throughout the school site but as the number of users and client devices increased the availability of Wi-Fi to users decreased. Lessons that once were carried out with hand-held devices and Laptops slowly ceased to be possible leading to considerable frustration and this impacted on lesson planning.
The Right Product
There were several key objectives for this project which included a system that was capable of Hi-density performance, high throughput over a large campus environment, seamless mobility, cost-effective, able to take full advantage of the capabilities of the laptops, tablets, and hand-held devices the school had invested in and minimal to Zero ongoing costs.
On such a large campus, a robust enterprise solution was required and once installed had to operate problem free from day one as the potential for major disruption was not an option.
Several manufacturers were selected to conduct trials including EnGenius; extensive tests were undertaken taking a total of three months to complete.
Budget cuts across the education sector meant that the solution had to be robust, scalable and have incisive analytics to enable the Network Manager to see briefly what was happening across the site as well as have minimal ongoing costs once installed. Erith School is a specialised Sports College producing several well-known Athletes and has extensive playing fields that also required external Wi-Fi coverage.
At the end of the trial period, EnGenius was selected due to its performance, range, and ease of management and with an added benefit of Zero ongoing costs.
The EnGenius Neutron Solution provides a seamless Wi-Fi blanket across the school both internally and externally. Its superior signal strength enables coverage not only for users on the pitches but also in the Community Sports Complex, multiple sports halls and class and lecture rooms.
An EnGenius solution could offer the school a whole host of benefits which included an affordable and Enterprise level Wi-Fi solution, easy to install and set up, concise analytics, superior signal strength, free lifetime warranty, free Firmware upgrades for life and free technical support.
The Installation
91 EnGenius EWS360AP internal access points were installed across the site and 3 EWS660AP external access points for playing field coverage, with the whole solution managed by the Free EzMaster Management suite that enables the addition of multiple sites to be added to the management console. EzMaster is especially useful for Academies that may have multiple locations.
Due to the size of this project and the limited IT resource, in terms of numbers of staff, within the school EnGenius provided an IT Engineer from the Netherlands branch office to assist in the installation ensuring a smooth transition to the EnGenius Neutron Solution.
The Result
We invited several Wi-Fi manufacturers to tender for our campus requirement and selected EnGenius not only for their competitiveness but the complete support along the whole selection process. The on- site technical availability of an EnGenius engineer when the installation was installed was extremely useful and quite unexpected. We have approximately 2000 users on campus and it was important that the Wi-Fi performed from day one.”
Marc Hawkins, Erith School Business Manager
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