UK Isle of Wight College Students Gain FREE Wireless Broadband

Some 1,500 full-time students and staff at the Isle of Wight College (IoWC) look set to benefit after a major IT upgrade delivered campus-wide access to free wireless broadband (wifi) and Internet telephony.

The aim of the new network, aside from helping the college to keep up with modern technology, is to achieve much-needed savings by reducing classroom time and facilitating self-study. The government’s move to cut spending means that the education sector has been forced to find new ways of reducing costs and this is apparently one of those solutions.

The network manager at the IoWC, Rosie Quelch, explained: “The boom in personal mobile devices; be they smart phones, laptops or tablets has meant we have had to rethink our IT. We were faced with incredible demands from our student body to introduce wireless technology. What was becoming clear was that learning is no longer confined to the classroom, or to fixed point PCs … wireless really is a ‘must-have’ now as students want to be able to securely access their own devices as and when they want to.”