Vale of Glamorgan Council Upgrades to Higher Bandwidth Network for New Demanding Academic Applications
Highlights
- Customer: Vale of Glamorgan Council
- Application: Backhaul
- Solution: Tsunami® Point-to-Point
- Vale of Glamorgan cost effectively connects all its academic institutions in the county
- Reliable, high capacity Proxim Wireless solutions support bandwidth hungry education applications such as VLE, Youtube etc
- ProximVision® allows centralized network management and effortless troubleshooting
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.
