VIDEO: St. Bede’s College Replaces Wired Connections with High Performance Wi-Fi from Xirrus
Xirrus®, the Wi-Fi "Power Play" that delivers the most coverage, bandwidth, and user density in the industry, announced today the deployment of their high performance 802.11n Wi-Fi Arrays across St. Bede’s College located just outside Mentone, Victoria, Australia. Known for their academic and sporting excellence, St. Bede’s College is a 7-12 Catholic Secondary College for boys with enrollment of over 1,330 students and faculty. To make learning more enjoyable and efficient, the school decided to roll out netbooks for their students and faculty. Xirrus was selected as the Wi-Fi solution because Xirrus was able to deliver the necessary bandwidth to support dense user populations with 75% fewer devices, cables, switch ports, and power.
“We wanted to bring the whole IT experience into the classroom, so that on their desk a student is integrated with his books, he’s taking his notes, and he’s got his netbook right there with him,” said David Cracknell, IT Director at St. Bede’s College. “Every netbook that we put out, we’ve got a massive positive response from staff and students on how it’s working. It gives them flexibility in the classroom.”
“The first test of the Xirrus product was when we brought out the new set of staff notebooks – we had 30 netbooks sitting in the one room ready to connect,” continued David. “I was a little bit nervous, but it performed faultlessly. It was fantastic. Every staff member was on wireless within seconds. All there was were smiles around the room of the staff all getting on wirelessly. They could throw their blue cables away.”
Talking about costs, David said, “We were making a massive savings going with Xirrus. We were only cabling to one point to support the whole floor. If we went with the alternative offering, we would have been running data and power cables to multiple points per floor. It was an easy choice for us.”
