Case Study: NETGEAR Wireless Technology at Stargate School

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CASE STUDY:
Stargate School
www.netgear.com
Stargate’s continued growth, coupled with its use of technology,
implementation of state mandated online student testing and only
17 access points located throughout the entire school, connectivity
and coverage had become significant issues. Each access point had to
serve four to five classrooms and they were unable to keep pace with
the growing number of devices joining the network. “They simply
couldn’t handle the kind of load that was put on them every day, and
it’s an insufficient number to provide adequate coverage,” says Dale.
“Also, since everybody starts class at the same time, each morning
there was a ‘race to the finish’ mentality to see who would get the
limited number of connections. The first several students would get
on the network and everybody else was just out of luck.”
SOLUTION
ABILITY TO MEET CURRENT AND FUTURE REQUIREMENTS
As construction was getting underway, Dale began planning the
technology package to support the expanded environment. To
facilitate the assessment of potential solutions, Dale and his team
shortlisted the key requirements to handle the school’s existing
needs, as well as plan for future requirements.
They knew they would require a significantly higher number of access
points to deliver 100 percent coverage across all three buildings, as
well as the ability to easily manage all of them from a central location.
In addition, they would need the ability to support more than 600
BYOD clients on a daily basis and 802.11ac would be required to
handle higher density classroom traffic. 10-Gigabit link aggregation
(LAG) to support the capacity requirements of a large number of
simultaneous data transfers was also highly desirable. “We needed
to build a system that could handle the current and emerging needs
of a technology savvy student population and a state-of-the-art
educational facility,” says Dale. “We also knew that we needed to
plan for a level of capacity that would be capable of facilitating
future growth without running into more bottlenecks.” Dale and his
team determined that a NETGEAR wireless system would best fit the
school’s needs, as well as their limited budget.
RESULTS
NETGEAR® PROSAFE® DELIVERS THE IDEAL SOLUTION
Based on Dale’s recommendation, Stargate School purchased 100
NETGEAR WAC730 ProSAFE Wireless Access Points to ensure
100 percent coverage campus-wide and support the school’s
BYOD requirements; and a WC9500 ProSAFE High Capacity
Wireless Controller to facilitate efficient configuration and ongoing
management across the entire system. The switch solution,
comprised of NETGEAR ProSAFE M7100s/M7300s in the core, with
NETGEAR ProSAFE S3300 switch stacks, allowed them to connect
stacks at multiple 10G to ensure that they would avoid running
into bottlenecks. “NETGEAR checked all the boxes, and did it within
budget,” says Dale, “We were able to get everything on the school’s
list of needs without having to make compromises.”
Due to construction timelines, the building was not ready for the
NETGEAR installation until the last minute. Two weeks before the
start of school, Dale and his team had to move quickly to get
everything set up. Despite the tight timeframe and the additional
stress of starting school without the opportunity to fully test the
new system, everything was ready in time, and both Xcelitek and
Stargate are pleased with the results. “Since we installed the new
NETGEAR system, they haven’t had any performance issues and the
faculty and students now enjoy uninterrupted high performance
wireless every day,” says Dale. “For me, that’s the greatest news I can
have. To walk in on the first day of school with a new system, and
therefore not fully knowing what to expect, it was a huge relief that
it just worked. I consider that an overwhelming success!”
T: 1-408-907-8000, E: [e-mail], Technical support: 1-888-NETGEAR
ProSAFE® WAC730ProSAFE® WC9500