John Septimus Roe School

Industry: Education

September 21,2016

John Septimus Roe Anglican Community School
Network Upgrade for entire school site

The Challenge:

The education environment is complex and challenging with ever changing demands for IT services and support, as well as capacity. Schools require effective penetration of high capacity services across multiple campuses, with good service reliability and cost effectiveness.

With aging and varied infrastructure already pushed to its limits, John Septimus Roe (JSR) required a major rework to their network infrastructure and engaged XCy to rebuild the network on their Mirrabooka Campus.

The Solution:

An audit of existing IT infrastructure was made to identify what parts could be reused to save costs. Some existing optical fibre cables could be used but others needed to be replaced and some new cables needed to be installed. The core and edge switching was replaced to improved uplink capacity and edge switch capacity to cater for the high-density wireless system. The campus wireless network was replaced with a fully meshed wireless LAN to vastly increase the capacity to deliver high speed data to classroom environments with a high mobile device count. The project also included review of the upstream internet and inter-campus links.

“XCy took on all responsibility and challenges for putting together our cyber IT solutions. This included the development of all the technical plans as well as the project management of the implementation within the needed timelines. They worked around our school schedules and there was no downtime for us during our hours of operation. Simply put, their technical knowledge and project planning skills made the transition to the new wireless infrastructure a seamless process for all students and staff”.
– Tom Dudek

The network was carefully designed with formal design documentation. A project plan was developed to allow execution of the work within the school’s requirements for access, third party services and schedule requirements to limit service interruptions. The plan was reviewed by the school’s IT committee with issues and concerns addressed before approval.

The Outcomes:

XCy took ownership and responsibility for the project and the upgrade was completed on time and on budget.
Testing of the installation was part of the execution plan with results included in the project reporting for approval and sign-off by the school.
As is normal with projects, some aspects did not work out as planned. These were resolved in partnership with the school to find suitable workarounds or solutions.
Generally the capacity of the network infrastructure improved by orders of magnitude with significantly improved reliability and maintainability.
Live testing with high device density classes showed wireless capacity hugely improved.
Importantly, teachers and students now spend less time dealing with IT limits or errors and more time effectively teaching and learning, thanks to our IT project management.

How can we help you?

XCy has strong skills and capabilities to plan and execute complex upgrades or IT infrastructure, with a focus on delivery cost effective solutions which will scale to you future requirements.
In addition we can work with customers such as schools with special requirements for access, scheduling and phased work packages.