St Josephs Secondary School is a Catholic Secondary School under the trusteeship of CEIST. They have recently moved into a new purpose built school in Tulla, Co. Clare. As part of the whole school ICT Fitout, an enterprise WiFi system was installed to provide full coverage over the entire school campus.
The 42 x Aerohive 802.11ac access points were installed to provide coverage for the entire school. These new access points provide up to 850Mb of shared bandwidth each. Both the 5.0GHz and the older 2.4GHz bands are supported. Mobile devices that support the newer 5.0GHz bandwidth are automatically connected to this. Coverage and performance are excellent. An ultra-fast 10GB fiber backbone using Dell Enterprise switches provides the underlying infrastructure on which the WiFi network operates.
In common with all high end WiFi solutions, amateur “single password to access” wifi is not used as this would not allow any real security. Users require their regular network credentials to access the wifi system, allowing a greater level of security and stability. This simplifies management of the connections and user credentials. Bring your own device is fully supported (BYOD)
One of the great features available with the Aerohive system is that only a single SSID is required. Clients are automatically assigned internally to the correct set of policies based on the users membership of Active Directory (AD). e.g. Youtube.com can be available to all teaching staff and this can be blocked for students. This simplifies the management of the overall solution and removed multiple SSID from being broadcast, thereby improving the bandwidth available for real traffic. Users can have their bandwidth restricted to prevent a single user flooding the system.
