SCIENCE

Xirrus has announced the deployment of Xirrus high performance 802.11n Wi-Fi Arrays across all five secondary schools operated by the Armidale Catholic Schools Office (CSO) in Armidale, New South Wales, Australia. The Armidale CSO strives to provide each school under its administration with the provisions necessary to create modern and progressive learning environments for the students and staff. They endured several sub-par wireless systems before discovering the Xirrus Wi-Fi Array, which they implemented in every secondary school to solve the user density issues and provide the students with a robust and reliable wireless network.

Justin Urquhart, ICT Supervisor at Armidale Catholic Schools explains why wireless was a requirement in their schools, “We chose to deploy Wi-Fi because our schools are getting an increasing number of wireless capable devices emerging in the classrooms such as notebooks and iPods. Wireless Internet gives the students and teachers more flexibility to utilize that equipment anywhere in the classroom and beyond.”

“Over the years we have used a number of different Wi-Fi solutions,” continued Justin, “but we always had the same problem – if too many students tried to get online at once it would come to a halt. We then had Xirrus show us exactly what their Wi-Fi Array could do. We were very impressed with Array’s capabilities such as load balancing, stability of connection, and robustness of the solution. Those were definitely deciding factors in choosing Xirrus, along with the fact that less equipment was required than if we had chosen another vendor. However, the main perk was that Xirrus enables a lot of students to log on to the wireless network at the same time while remaining stable enough for them to get their work done. The Xirrus Arrays work brilliantly – we haven’t experienced any issues with them at all and the coverage that we get now is second to none.”