London South Bank University

High-Speed Wireless Enables Full-Time Internet Access For Students.

London South Bank University is a dynamic, inner-city university with a diverse multi-cultural population of some 17,000 students and around 1700 staff. The university has been providing high quality education in London for over 100 years and their students and staff come from a variety of communities and countries, making a truly multi-cultural environment.

Problem

Providing Internet access is an important part of South Bank University’s service to its students, in particular to the students resident in halls on the campus. Three of the University’s halls of residence were connected to the main campus via radio based wi-fi connections. However this solution did not deliver high-enough bandwidth, often failing to deliver any more than 3Mbps of throughput for each link. This level of bandwidth was grossly inadequate and would often cause problems for students using the Internet connection, and in-turn causing a major headache for South Bank University’s IT team.

Solution

South Bank University turned to AIT Partnership to provide a high bandwidth Free Space Optic (FSO) wireless solution.

After visiting the site and conducting a site survey AIT proposed the installation of five wireless links to meet the varying distance requirements between sites. FSO solutions were chosen to deliver 100Mbps of data throughput.

Result

To date AIT Partnership has installed five FSO point-to-point laser links at South Bank University. The university’s students now enjoy a much more reliable, high-bandwidth connection to the Internet at their halls of residence.

Soghra Zamani, Network Manager at South Bank University said: ‘’After the initial teething problem, the engineer from AIT Partnership who was our main contact did an excellent job and finished the whole thing in a short space of time"