Chicago School Improves Network Performance For Students with Xirrus Wi-Fi Arrays

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Free-Press-Release.com) March 18, 2009 --

Xirrus, Inc., the Wi-Fi "Power-Play" that delivers the most wireless coverage, bandwidth, and throughput in the industry announced today the deployment of their Wi-Fi Arrays across The Catherine Cook School, located in Chicago, Illinois. The Catherine Cook School replaced their existing Access Point infrastructure with Xirrus Wi-Fi Arrays to gain better network performance for their one-to-one computer initiative and real-time learning applications used by students and teachers. The transition to the Xirrus Wi-Fi Arrays was quick, seamless, and provided the school with the necessary bandwidth for Wi-Fi to be their primary network connection.

“We have a one-to-one laptop program in place for our 4th-8th grade students, which requires reliable network access campus-wide to be successful,” said Bill Mierisch, Director of Technology at Catherine Cook School. “In addition to this group of 125 students, we also have two mobile laptop carts with 40 computers serving over 200 younger students, 10 wireless desktop computers stationed in classrooms, and an assortment of more than 100 laptops, Blackberrys®, iPhones®, and Windows® Mobile® smartphones used by our staff and parent volunteers.”

“We called in Xirrus to fix the emerging problems of our Cisco wireless implementation—things like maxed out controllers due to our increasing enrollment, network cost over-runs, and arcane skill sets required to manage the network,” continued Bill. “One particular application that was vital to our classroom success was DyKnow®, a classroom management and instructional software package operating over Port 80. With the Cisco’s products, we were getting persistent instabilities, which frustrated our teachers and students alike. We knew we had to find a solution that was sustainable over the long term, give us the ability to connect large masses of students in small spaces, and scale for future considerations.”

“Xirrus helped us expand our network capacity with both excellent products and great ideas,” continued Bill. “With over 90% of our clients able to use the 5Ghz band, our capacity for connections increased exponentially with Xirrus’ multi-radio Arrays. What’s more, during our roll-out, Xirrus helped us identify a problem that had lurked without our knowledge on a legacy server, which resulted in a dramatic drop-off in support calls relating to client connectivity.”

“Thanks to Xirrus, we no longer need an AP in every room,” added Bill. “In fact, for roughly the cost of what our Cisco upgrade alone would have set us back, we now have a network that works, is stable, and has the ‘headroom’ we need to support an increasing enrollment in our school. As for the Wi-Fi facelift, we were up and running in just hours, and did not need to pull any new wiring or add anything other than the Xirrus Arrays. In fact, we did not even announce to our users that we had made the switch. It happened seamlessly, with folks returning to school from Winter Break.

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