April 21, 2008 -- Galen Catholic College of Wangaratta, Victoria, Australia has deployed Xirrus' Wi-Fi Arrays to support high density, campus-wide classrooms applications. The Xirrus product is designed to replace wired Ethernet workgroup switches.
Galen is a year 7 to 12 co-educational Catholic secondary college located three hours north of Melbourne. With seventeen buildings covering over 63,000 sq. ft. (19,428 sq. m.) of educational space, the college services nearly 900 students from Wangaratta and other local districts. The institution installed a Wi-Fi network several years ago, but says that large numbers of concurrent users caused it to be plagued with slow connections and poor overall performance.
"Our legacy network could not support the increasing number of concurrent notebook computers - quickly growing from 187 to 250 notebooks. Students often complained about 10 minute associations, increasing frustration rather than productivity," says Dave Seiter, principal at Galen Catholic College. "We desperately needed a powerful Wi-Fi network to support our many classrooms and applications, with the capability of moving to 802.11n later without having a forklift upgrade."
Galen says it reviewed several leading Wi-Fi architectures, but found them lacking in performance, as well as too costly due to a large amount of required devices, cables, and additional software packages.
"We chose Xirrus due to their technical superiority and simplistic architecture - their ability to cover large areas, support large numbers of concurrent connections, and upgrade to 802.11n with ease," comments James Shields, IT manager at Galen Catholic College. "Xirrus came out, performed an active site survey, and had the entire network running in no time. Everyone at Galen is extremely impressed with the never-before-seen connectivity, which translates to more educational time. We are building a new school and will incorporate Xirrus into those plans as well."
"By going with the Xirrus Wi-Fi Array solution, Galen was able to increase productivity of its students and faculty while saving time and money over cumbersome controller-based designs," concludes Tony De La Rosa, regional director for Xirrus. "Student productivity drastically increased as a result of the Xirrus deployment, not to mention the $200,000 saved by repurposing two computer rooms for general instructional use."