UK High School Receives Long Overdue Upgrade to Its Wireless Network -
Brighton, England
Longhill High School is a large secondary school catering to around 1,800 pupils and staff. The school, which originally opened in 1964, is nestled at the foot of the South Downs near Rottingdean in the UK.
At that time, the school named all six of its houses after some of the finest castles in Sussex. In 2018, the houses were renamed after humbler local landmarks—Brighton Dome, Brighton Lanes, Brighton Pavilion and Brighton Pier.
The multi-story school building and the athletic fields to the west cover about 13 acres, not including additional fields to the south. The Wi-Fi coverage area was challenging, but that wasn’t the only problem.
The student body was also growing.
The Need
The school had an existing Wi-Fi solution that provided poor coverage and couldn’t handle the explosion of client devices necessary to deliver a full curriculum to its growing student body. The school’s existing wireless network needed a total overhaul.
Specifically, the school needed a high performing, enterprise-level product incorporating the latest WiFi 6 standards able to work in a high density, high demand environment. However, with a limited budget, the school needed an affordable solution.
Administrators also had to act quickly before the school re-opened its doors for the new school year.
The Solution
Following discussions with a number of secondary schools in the Brighton, Hove, and surrounding areas, Longhill decided to go with EnGenius as these schools had reported great success with their upgrades.
The EnGenius portfolio of networking solutions includes a comprehensive range of Cloud-managed and on-premises managed wireless solutions as well as Cloud-managed gigabit, 2.5 gigabit and 10 gigabit switches that deliver long-range connectivity and robust feature sets.
The selling point was that—while its network devices adhered to the latest standards—EnGenius also promised license-free management, no ongoing subscription costs, a limited lifetime warranty, and free lifetime firmware upgrades.
EnGenius was the obvious choice.
The Result
Longhill High School is one of the largest educational institutions in Brighton. Therefore, before a solution could be determined, a full site survey had to be conducted.
Using the EnGenius heat mapping tool, the EnGenius product lead at Cable Management Warehouse settled on a suite of EWS357AP indoor access points, EWS660AP outdoor access points, and EWS1200-28TFP switches.
These access points were built for high density environments and designed to run more efficiently using less power. The WPA3 security standard would also keep client and IoT devices more secure.
The switches proved to offer Longhill simple network configuration, monitoring, and management through an easy-to-use Web and mobile interface. The switch model also came with PoE+ (Power-over-Ethernet), which allows Longhill’s access points to be powered from the switch as well as send and receive data.
PoE eliminated the need for the school to install extra power cables for the APs, saving Longhill even more money.
Among a growing number of satisfied secondary school clients in the UK, EnGenius was able to add one more—Longhill High School.
