Case Study: NETGEAR Wireless Technology at Blundell's School

© NETGEAR UK Ltd., Reflex, Cain Road, Bracknell, Berkshire. RG12 1HL.
T: [phone], E: [e-mail], Technical support: 0844 875 4000
CASE STUDY:
Blundell’s School
www.netgear.co.uk
Over the years, the development of Blundell’s network had been
organic, however Martin and his team were keen that any changes
they made to the network infrastructure was flexible enough to be
able to future-proof the system for years to come. “As a school, we
are keen to embrace technology to enhance the learning experience
for our students, but we are always having an eye to the future,”
said Martin. “As we are not blessed with a huge IT department, any
solution we choose not only needs to be cost effective, but needs
to be intuitive and easy to use to reduce management overhead.”
SOLUTION
“When looking to update our network, we asked around within
our peer group of schools and put together a list of potential
suppliers for an overhaul of our wireless network, one of which was
NETGEAR,” explained Martin. “After due diligence, we felt that not
only did NETGEAR provide a very cost effective solution for us, but
we were also particularly impressed by its deep reaching customer
service and willingness to undertake a free site survey for us.”
Martin and his team decided upon NETGEAR’s WC9500 Wireless
Controller. Unlike other WLAN systems that are costly, complex
and cumbersome to deploy, the WC9500 high capacity wireless
controller is ideal for education establishments. The NETGEAR
WC9500 is designed with simplicity in management and ease of use
to enable users to set up the systems in minutes.
“We wanted a solution that wasn’t labour intensive so it was perfect
for us,” explained Martin. “We liked that the NETGEAR WC9500 had
intuitive management interfaces that allows us to set up a complete
wireless network so quickly.”
The NETGEAR WC9500 comes with sophisticated load balancing and
rate limiting, to provide fair bandwidth allocation among all clients for
robust wireless connectivity. “Effective load balancing is imperative
for us. As students move to a particular classroom there is always
a large spike in demand for the nearest access point. Therefore, we
needed a dynamic system that could seamlessly switch between
access points where relevant to share the load,” said Martin.
Blundell’s School also installed 45 ProSAFE® WNDAP360
access points from NETGEAR as part of the deployment.
These combine high-performance, dual-band performance
with smartly designed management and deployment features
– like flexible and easy mounting options – into one reliable,
affordable, and easy-to-use package.
RESULTS
The time savings for Martin and his team following the network
upgrade has been instant. “The school supports an environment for
bring your own device (BYOD), and runs a separate VLAN for the
devices that the students bring in. In fact, we actively encourage
students to bring their own laptops to classes once they reach
year 10,” said Martin. “Rather than the students having to come to
us, we now automatically push a wireless config file out to all the
devices at once which has became a huge time saver and been very
popular with the students.”
Martin has also seen an increase in teachers using devices –
whether it is laptop, tablet or phone – as part of their day-to-day
learning toolkit. “Updating our wireless network with NETGEAR has
increased both the bandwidth and resilience of our network. We
no longer have any dropouts as students and teachers are moving
around the campus, so the confidence has returned.”
Blundell’s School is continuing to work with NETGEAR to further
improve its 10GbE backbone, further reducing the chance of
bottlenecks across the networks as more bandwidth intensive
applications are placed onto the network. “We have plans to place
all our CCTV security feeds onto the network and add a second
dedicated VLAN for our students to use for online gaming on their
PlayStations and XBOXs, so we need to pre-empt this,” added
Martin. “Our new NETGEAR wireless network allows us to expand
with future network requirements without the need for costly rip
and replace.”
Updating our wireless network with
NETGEAR has increased both the
bandwidth and resilience of our
network. We no longer have any
dropouts as students and teachers
are moving around the campus, so
the confidence has returned.
Martin Dyer,
Director of IT, Blundell’s School