Xirrus® announced today the deployment of Xirrus high performance Wi-Fi Arrays throughout Fountain Fort Carson School District Eight in Fountain, Colorado.
The district has a total enrollment of 7,502 students along with over a thousand staff members throughout 15 buildings. Academic achievement is the district’s number one priority and their reason for continually striving to enhance the technologies available within their learning environment. In an effort to maximize student learning after implementing their 1-1 laptop initiative, Fountain Fort Carson replaced their existing wireless network with the Wi-Fi Arrays manufactured by Xirrus.
“Our foray into wireless started at the high school with the 1-1 laptop initiative pilot,” said Tammy Woods, Network Manager at Fountain Fort Carson School District. “The program eventually developed and matured to a level at which we had to re-evaluate the wireless infrastructure we had in place. Now that we’ve replaced the [previous] gear with Xirrus, we have half the number of devices to manage and our density issues are a thing of the past.
“Another wireless challenge we faced was using laptops in our elementary schools for testing with Scantron, a web-based assessment tool that requires a stable point-to-point connection,” continued Tammy. “We needed our wireless in those buildings to work as well as our wired network. Having dropped connections when kids are taking tests just wasn’t an option."
"From the start, though, we were intrigued by Xirrus’ ability to support the user density we have at our high school, by their ability to provide a viable replacement for the Ethernet network, and by their ability to expand and adapt to handle the unknowns of the future. While the technology Xirrus has is great, it was actually their knowledgeable staff, willingness to go above and beyond to make sure we had everything we needed, and great technical support that put them over-the-top in our eyes. When you have a small support staff like we do, it’s important to have such robust backup from the vendors,” she concluded.
