Villiers Secondary School is a co-educational, fee paying, boarding and day secondary school, located on the North Circular Road in Limerick.
As part of a whole school ICT fitout, Villiers installed a Managed Enterprise WiFi network to provide coverage for the entire school campus. 38 x 802.11 a/b/g/n/ wired access points are used to provide this coverage. A high performance 4GB wired network provides the connectivity and power to the Access Points and adequate bandwidth for potentially more than 800 wifi enabled devices on campus.
All “Staff” & “Students” traffic is separated on the network so that some devices and resources are only accessible by teachers. 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 also means that passwords only need to be changed in one place, reducing the management overhead and all traffic is logged back to a user even when using their own device.
Access to the WiFi network extends right through to 10:30 pm each evening. Restrictions on the Student WiFi prevent students accessing the WiFi before 7:30 am and after 10:30 pm. No such restrictions exist on the staff WiFi as some staff members require access to the wifi network 24/7. Bring your own device is fully supported (BYOD)
Extensive logging is enabled on the wifi system to allow management to check what devices are present, what users are currently connected and what they are accessing.
The school uses two separate internet connections. One is provided by the Department of Education through the HEANet. This connection is the standard 100Mb schools broadband that is filtered by the Dept. Students use this connection to access the internet, providing safe and filtered access to the internet for students.
The “Staff” wifi is only accessible to members of staff. Through the “Staff” wifi connection, additional services are available through the second UPC 100Mb internet connection. This includes access to Youtube.com and other resources that are unavailable on the student wifi.
