How to supercharge your school


For a principal living in the digital age, making sure their school’s data flows quickly and without incident is a priority.
 
However, while almost every school has Internet access, the bandwidth speeds they have to work with can sometimes be burdensome – both for staff and the students using it in their day-to-day learning.
 
Xirrus – a Wi-Fi solutions company, which prides itself as being “the fastest Wi-Fi on the planet” – is helping schools supercharge their bandwidth and, in the process, improve how their staff and students access and use data.
 
John Lee, ICT supervisor at Marist College Ashgrove, located in Brisbane, told The Educator that his school has seen improved Wi-Fi coverage and high density since using Xirrus.
 
“The most noticeable changes were that students and staff can now get access to internet, mail their network drives anywhere in the school without too many issues,” Lee said.
 
Lee added that Xirrus has met all of the school’s needs since installation and to this point has been working well.
 
In 2009 St Bede’s College, located in Melbourne, invested in Xirrus wireless as a school-wide wireless solution and has since recently replaced and expanded the solution to triple the number of wireless arrays.
 
The school’s deputy principal and head of ICT and infrastructure, David Cracknell, told The Educator that the motivating factors for his school in adopting this technology included improving reliability for users and saving money.
 
“The motivating factors were reliability for the end user in mixed density environments, support provided by Xirrus before and after deployment, cabling cost savings achieved through the efficient positioning of multi-radio arrays, and the flexibility of the expandable chassis units to adapt to our projected future needs,” he said.
 
“Silence is golden when it comes to IT infrastructure management in schools - as you want the wireless experience to be as dependable as turning on a water tap for the end user.”
 
Cracknell said the school’s students and staff are now so confident with the dependability of our Xirrus solution that the school uses it to support CCTV access, video conferencing, cloud video streaming and other tasks we traditionally trusted to only wired solutions.
 
Phil Tarbox, regional director of Australia and New Zealand at Xirrus, told The Educator that it is important for schools to invest in this technology because teachers and students alike depend on – and expect to use – Wi-Fi throughout the learning and teaching experience in schools everywhere today.
 
“From marking the attendance to collaborating with students and accessing learning materials, students and teacher expect reliable Wi-Fi, 100% of the time. Xirrus cloud-managed Wi-Fi solutions provide fast, reliable, secure Wi-Fi access not only in the classroom, but in every location on campus,” Tarbox said.
 
He added that Xirrus was the only company that offered “multi-radio Wi-Fi platforms for high performance and high density”.
 
“Our solutions range from two radio APs up to eight radio APs. Add more radios to an AP with just a click: up to eight per AP. That means replacing less APs and scaling up your network right along with your business,” he said.
 
“A Xirrus Wi-Fi solution delivers on today’s needs and guarantees an easy, cost effective path to solve future needs. Software programmable radios enable upgrades to Wi-Fi technology standards with a mouse click.”