When Alamanda College opened in 2013, it was presented with an interesting challenge.
The K-9 public school had been built in the southwest corridor outside Melbourne – one of the fastest growing populations in Victoria. Not surprisingly, the suburb’s school district saw a massive expansion to meet the demand of a burgeoning number of new families moving into the area to enjoy its spoils.
In less than a decade, Alamanda College’s enrolments swelled to 3,000 students and 250 staff. The campus size has kept pace with the student population, growing exponentially with classrooms added each year.
As in other large educational institutions, a robust, agile and reliable network was critical in ensuring a seamless teaching and learning experience. To meet this important need, the College turned to Juniper Networks, a global leader of networking and security solutions in the Cloud, AI, and 5G era.
Create a smarter school network
Since moving to Juniper’s cohesive, wired and wireless network, students, teachers, and administrators have been enjoying better digital learning experiences with reliable connections to online learning tools, video, and the Internet.
The College’s initial lift transitioned the campus wired network, servers, and voice communications to the cloud. Then the wireless LAN took center stage, and a cloud-managed network had strong appeal.
“We have had zero wireless issues with our Juniper Mist network. Before we would get 10 calls a day about clients not connecting to the network.” - Tony Pace, specialist technician, eduSTAR.TSS, Information Management and Technology Division, Alamanda College
The lean ICT team at Alamanda College was able to build a strong record of success and a reputation for excellent network user experiences empowered by a Juniper network driven by Mist AI.
Visibility into the user experience is key for the digital learning experiences of thousands of students. In addition to the 1:1 learning devices distributed to every student, the school’s network supports students’ and teachers’ personal devices, Google phones, MacBooks, iPads, iPhones, IPTVs, and IP phones. Some 5000 devices connect to the school’s network every day.
The school had long struggled with intermittent connectivity issues in the classrooms. Mist AI swiftly identified the problem as dynamic frequency selection (DFS) timeouts due to the nearby Royal Australian Air Force station.
Mist AI leveraged reinforcement learning from its rich data science toolbox to automatically resolve the RF problem so students and teachers could connect easily.
“We have had zero wireless issues with our Juniper Mist Platform,” Pace says. “Before we would get 10 calls a day about clients not connecting to the network.
One staff member’s laptop repeatedly experienced long connection times. Mist AI-driven troubleshooting tools showed that the laptop had a low signal and thus difficulty roaming. It turns out that the Wi-Fi chip had dislodged.
Since moving to a cohesive Juniper wired and wireless network, students, teachers, and administrators enjoy better digital learning experiences with reliable connections to online learning tools, video, and the Internet.
Read the full case study and register to attend or receive the on-demand recording for Juniper’s Fireside Chat with Tony Pace, of Alamanda College and learn how Alamanda College created a smarter school network with Mist AI.