Case Study

Introduction

Located in the southern most point of Wales, Vale of Glagmorgan is a county borough known for its rich history, geography and a thriving agricultural industry. The Vale has several notable attractions including Barry Island Pleasure Park and is made up of over forty villages with over 80 educational institutions including primary/secondary schools and colleges. The majority of the schools were connected via a central wired WAN network to support administrative and education applications.

Challenge

With ongoing expensive maintenance and capital costs, and demand for high-bandwidth applications the Vale of Glamorgan Council decided to investigate alternative solutions to the existing wireline network. The new network was required to support the exponential growth in multimedia academic applications, such as modern day Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) and video streaming on YouTube and BBC iplayer. Financial analysis for using and expanding the wire line network showed this would result in large recurring investments and high capital costs due to constant upgrades.

Solution

Proxim Wireless, along with ‘Networks By Wireless’, the largest wireless networking company in the UK, addressed this challenge with high performance point to point Tsunami® series of radios. The Tsunami® point to point radios leverage Proxim’s Wireless Outdoor Routing Protocol (WORP®), and ClearConnect technology to offer a series of performance advantages in QoS and performance. Additionally, Proxim’s network management system enables fault detection and easy troubleshooting, which was not available with the previous WAN infrastructure. The solution also allows consolidation of antivirus, web filtering, IPS and data leak prevention across the network with complete PCI compliance.

From a cost efficiency standpoint, saving the time and labor involved in trenching wires/fiber, the Proxim network lowered recurring operation expenses for communications and provided the solution at a fraction of the cost of the earlier wire line network.

Result

“Since the migration over to the Vale Wireless WAN there has been a huge improvement in both Internet connection speeds and network speeds. The speed improvements have made all school internet applications run a lot faster and both teachers and students have commented that browsing the internet is a lot faster and more consistent.” — St Cyres School.

“Until our Proxim wireless network was deployed, our school had been experiencing extremely slow internet connections due to our high bandwidth usage by other applications. This made streaming videos (e.g. YouTube) unusable, even general surfing was becoming a problem. Since moving to the new wireless WAN this is no longer a problem. We now have a very fast connection and can see a noticeable difference. We are very happy with the new connection.” — Stanwell School.