Case Studies

In Brief

Foxes Academy takes advantage of the latest G.SHDSL technology to deliver new network connectivity opportunities for staff and students

Project Benefits

“Lanode offered the most cost-effective solution to Foxes Academy's hardware requirements and also provided excellent pre-sales support and technical advice.”

Foxes Academy took advantage of Lanode's 30 day trial for two circuits and found “the connections performed flawlessly.” Following this successful trial Foxes went ahead to install the remaining links and achieved the maximum line speed of 2.3Mbps on all 7 circuits installed; the “connection performance to the Hotel network was excellent.”

“The connection of all seven residential houses using a secure, reliable and cost-effective method was successful. Compared to the cost of other solutions, Foxes Academy has made great savings while still meeting all the requirements initially set out.”

Foxes staff have felt the benefits of this technology upgrade as it has facilitated the creation of a shared resources drive. This new 'Resource Area' has granted staff access to company policies and procedures, among other documents that staff previously had to hold hard copies of and photocopy as required; now staff can print directly from the electronic version ensuring the latest version is always used. The network also enabled almost all faculty and students to have e-mail accounts, greatly reducing the amount of paperwork being passed between buildings via the internal mail system.

“The benefits of having all seven residential buildings connected to the network were immediately noticeable.”

Before the network was in place there was no JANET access from six of the seven residential houses. Now that Internet access via JANET is available for both staff and students, Foxes believe “it has quickly become an indispensable resource.” Overall Foxes felt “the project proved to be very successful.”

Foxes Academy is now looking at other ways to take full advantage of any spare bandwidth between the sites. Once the management information system is fully in use in the residential houses, the college will have a better idea of how much spare capacity is available. After further testing it may be possible to connect the digital phone system based at the Hotel to the network. This could potentially allow all residential houses to have Voice over IP phones, which would provide unprecedented cost savings without any further capital investment.