Aberdeenshire Council Prep Massive WiFi Upgrade for Local Schools

The Aberdeenshire Council in Scotland has signed a deal with Aerohive Networks that will result in a huge upgrade of 4,000 new WiFi access points to public sector sites across the county, with a specific focus on covering 170 schools and 50 other sites (public libraries and buildings etc.).

The forthcoming deployment forms part of the council’s new Digital Strategy, which is called ‘Innovate Aberdeenshire‘. Members of the public will also be able benefit by receiving free guest access to the network.

Apparently Aerohive has already deployed a number of successful school WiFi networks and the local authority were particularly attracted by their cloud-based solution, which should help the council’s IT team to identify and solve problems with greater efficiency.

The challenges of serving an area of 2,437 square miles meant that members of the council’s IT team would often have to drive huge distances to evaluate problems, but Aerohive’s single-view console provides the necessary visibility to identify issues remotely, decide upon the appropriate action and, ultimately, fix connection problems more effectively.

Nicola Graham, Council Head of Service (ICT), said:

“Our team has a vision that is geared towards digital and we recognized that our old kit wasn’t designed to support e-learning or this increased capacity of devices. We evaluated what pain points needed to be addressed now, but also anticipated what we require our network to do in the future.

The opportunity to change our network meant we could also evaluate what was being used across our corporate offices and public buildings. The number of users and devices which require wireless access has vastly increased since the current wireless solutions were installed. Corporate and curricular phones and tablets are now in common use, with many users and members of the public now also requiring the facility to enable internet access from their own personal phones, tablets and other devices.

We noted a 50% increase in internet bandwidth demand over the last three years and it is anticipated that this demand will only continue to grow as schools increase their use of mobile devices in the classroom, staff work more flexibly and further public internet access is provided in public buildings.”

At present it remains unclear how much the new upgrade is going to cost or how long it will take to complete the deployment, although apparently Aerohive has set tight deadlines that aim to avoid disruption during term time. All of this suggests that the roll-out should be fairly swift.

The move fits in with the UK and Scottish Government’s on-going efforts to deploy WiFi across most public sector sites.