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University of Bedfordshire

AIT installs Wireless LAN across 5 sites to ensure an always connected environment for staff and students.

With more than 24,000 students from the UK and around the world, the University of Bedfordshire has a growing global reputation for high quality research and teaching in a supportive, multi‐cultural environment.

The University has won numerous awards in recent years including: The Queens Award for enterprise in 2011 and the Times Higher Education Leadership and Management Award 2011 in the category Outstanding Finance Team.

The University is investing £180m in new facilities to support the teaching and research activities of staff and students enabling it to continue to grow
in all academic areas.

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Problem

As part of the University’s planned infrastructure renewal it wanted to connect all five of its campuses into one Wireless LAN network, creating an always connected environment for staff and students to work and relax.

Each of the University’s Campuses are self contained, providing a small and friendly atmosphere, but able to connect the central University resources.
The five sites are Bedford, Luton, Butterfield Park, Putteridge Bury and Buckinghamshire (Aylesbury).

Many of the sites have modern buildings enabling Wireless LAN to be easily fitted, however the Putteridge Bury campus provided special challenges. It is a magnificent old country mansion set in some 30 acres of woodland and built in 1911, with solid (thick) walls that tended to severely attenuate Wireless LAN signals.

Site Survey and Planning

A three step process was used to define the solution:

1: Information gathering – Floor plans for each site were obtained from the customer with any existing infrastructure marked on.
2: Site Survey – Engineers surveyed each site measuring signal loss through walls, floor and ceilings. An important step, it highlighted Putteridge Bury campus as being a special concern due to the extremely thick walls causing problems with signal propagation.
3: Planning ‐ Engineers used planning tools and experience to include obstacles in the floorplans and determine the best position to place wireless access points (APs) for optimal coverage.

Solution

AIT’s recommended solution involved fitting 235 APs across the five sites which were fitted over a holiday period at a time convenient to the University. The University wireless LAN is setup as a single domain with 8 WLAN controllers spread across the campuses. This configuration ensures high‐availability by removing any reliance on interconnecting leased lines between sites and ensures staff and students can log in to any of the five campuses.

The University’s WLAN has a single SSID (service set identifier) across all five sites, but for security each staff and student has an individual username/password controlled by active directory. This ensures that administrators remain in control of who accesses the network and enables them to set permissions to limit what resources/files each staff member or student may see.

Result

The University of Bedfordshire now has a world leading Wireless LAN solution allowing controlled access for staff and students at whatever campus they happen to be in and any time of day. The single mobile domain can be centrally administered allowing controlled, authorised only, access. New users can be quickly added and leavers quickly removed using the standard active directory administration policies of the University.

“AIT helped us to expand our Wireless LAN installation service across all of our five campuses,” said David Outram, Network Manager, University of Bedfordshire. “The Wireless LAN provides our staff and students access across all of our campuses, via their staff and student network ID’s from our LDAP service. In addition we can allow guest access which gives visitors access to the internet but keeps our internal systems secure.”

AIT provides maintenance and support services to the University, with a same day telephone and remote access support that solves most problems and a next day hardware replacement service ensuring that even serious hardware failures are quickly rectified. AIT also provides software support, proactively advises the University of firmware updates and carries out system “health checks” as necessary to ensure a reliable 24/7 operation.