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Xirrus, Inc. announced that Galen Catholic College located in Wangaratta, Victoria, Australia has deployed Xirrus Wi-Fi arrays to support high-performance applications and high-density classrooms campus-wide.

Comprised of 17 buildings with more than 63,000 square feet (19,428 square meters) of educational space, Galen Catholic College services nearly 900 students from Wangaratta and other local districts. Galen prides itself on teaching advanced reading, writing, and arithmetic, as well as how to cope and use technological advancements in society.

Galen installed a Wi-Fi network a few years ago to increase collaboration and education of its student body. However, like most schools with large numbers of concurrent users, Galen’s Wi-Fi network was plagued with slow connections and poor overall performance.

“Our legacy network could not support the increasing number of concurrent notebook computers—quickly growing from 187 to 250 notebooks—students often complained about 10-minute associations, increasing frustration rather than productivity,” said Dave Seiter, principal at Galen Catholic College. “We desperately needed a powerful Wi-Fi network to support our many classrooms and applications with the capability of moving to 802.11n later without having a forklift upgrade.”

Galen reviewed several of the leading Wi-Fi architectures, but found them lacking in performance as well as being too costly due to the large amounts of devices, cables, and additional software packages.

“We chose Xirrus due to their technical superiority and simplistic architecture—their ability to cover large areas, support large numbers of concurrent connections, and upgrade to 802.11n with ease,” said James Shields, IT manager at Galen Catholic College. “Xirrus came out, performed an active site survey, and had the entire network running in no time. Everyone at Galen is extremely impressed with the never before seen connectivity, which translates to more education time. We are building a new school and will incorporate Xirrus into those plans as well.”

“By going with the Xirrus Wi-Fi Array solution, Galen was able to increase productivity of its students and faculty while saving time and money over cumbersome controller-based designs,” said Tony De La Rosa, regional director for Xirrus. “Student productivity drastically increased as a result of the Xirrus deployment, not to mention the $200,000 saved by repurposing two computer rooms for general instructional use.”