Flagship BSF Academy Solves Capacity Wireless With Xirrus

SURREY, United Kingdom, Feb. 24 /PRNewswire/ -- Xirrus®, the Wi-Fi "Power Play" that delivers the most coverage, bandwidth, and throughput in the industry, announced today the deployment of their 802.11n Wi-Fi Arrays at the Bristol Brunel Academy (BBA), located in Bristol, UK.  This flagship Building Schools for the Future (BSF) solved its well-publicised, ongoing wireless user density problems by deploying a Xirrus high performance Wi-Fi network.  Opened in September 2007 by the Prime Minister Gordon Brown as the first BSF Academy, the vision of BBA was for a wireless education environment with hundreds of pupils accessing learning services and curriculum content through an advanced IT infrastructure.

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"The Academy was originally designed to have a primarily wireless network, however in a rapidly changing world in terms of communications systems, we soon began to demand more of our ICT systems than the original wireless network could offer.  This made it increasingly difficult to support the users, the throughput and the applications we required to make the Wireless Learning environment a reality," said Armando Di-Finizio, Principal of Bristol Brunel Academy.  "Xirrus came in, demonstrated in a logical fashion how their technology could cope in this environment, and then backed everything up with an implementation guarantee – making this a 'no risk' purchase for us, unlike anything else I have seen in IT."

Unlike other Wi-Fi vendors, Xirrus performs site surveys using real devices to help design a wireless solution capable of delivering the coverage, density, and bandwidth then back up those plans with an implementation guarantee.

"When Xirrus told me they could provide more capacity, bandwidth, and coverage than anyone else with fewer devices, I was sceptical and was advised that it just wasn't true," said Chris Mackintosh, Head of eLearning at BBA.  "When I saw the real-life site survey in progress and how well they understood the physics behind a user dense environment, I was confident they could deliver.  Then, when they mentioned their 100% implementation guarantee to us, there was no risk."

Chris continued, "In the end, Xirrus covered our academy with far fewer devices than would have been required by other suppliers, not to mention that there was no controller at the centre of the network overloading and waiting as a single point of failure."

"The Xirrus products have integrated with our systems and even with the infrastructure provided by our BSF contractor," added Chris.  "Their engineers were knowledgeable and always willing to go the extra mile to make sure everything was covered.  Thanks to Xirrus, we can log on over 500 students everyday anywhere in the Academy without issues and we are confident in pushing this to over 900 users in the coming years. In my opinion based on our experience, Xirrus should be considered the leader for Wi-Fi in an education environment. Xirrus' complete solution based on their knowledge, products, performance, implementation, and guarantee is serving us very well indeed."

"We're very pleased to deploy at BBA.  As a leading educational institution, we were aware of the pain that they were experiencing due to the limitations of a controller-based architecture.  The people onsite understood that the only way to solve the density issues was to move the intelligence to the edge and to increase the amount of radios available to the clients – much like a cellular network," said Ben Wilson, UK Country Manager for Xirrus.  "More and more organizations looking to deploy 802.11n as their primary network are realising that we have the only solution for user density on the market today – no one else comes close."

About Xirrus

Xirrus, the only Wi-Fi Power Play™, manufactures the Wi-Fi Array® architecture that displaces both overlay Wi-Fi offerings and switched Ethernet or Fast Ethernet to the desktop. Unlike traditional access points, the Wi-Fi Array integrates 4, 8, 12, 16 or 24 802.11abgn radios along with a high-gain directional antenna system, onboard multi-gigabit switch, Wi-Fi controller, firewall, dedicated Wi-Fi threat sensor, and an embedded spectrum analyzer into a single energy-efficient and cost-effective device using 75% fewer devices, cabling, switch ports, power, space, and installation time compared with any other offering.  Xirrus products are designed and manufactured in the United States.  Xirrus is ISO 9001:2008 and Verisign certified. For more information, please visit http://www.xirrus.com.

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SOURCE Xirrus