Plano ISD deploys new wireless network for their 53,000 students

by PegNews wire

PLANO — Xirrus, the wi-fi "Power-Play" that delivers the most coverage, bandwidth, and user density in the industry, announced today the deployment of Xirrus high performance 802.11n Wi-Fi Arrays across Plano Independent School District.

Plano ISD wanted to extend their secure and stable network infrastructure to their more than 53,000 students and 7,000 staff members located across 80+ sites via a wireless network. Plano ISD selected Xirrus after an exhaustive RFI process because Xirrus delivered a high performance distributed architecture providing secure remote connections with 75% fewer devices, cables, and switch ports, saving the district a substantial amount in equipment costs while also keeping operating expenses flat.

Dan Armstrong, Plano ISD's director of technical support services said, "After evaluating the Xirrus solution, we noticed that it would take about 75% less access points to deploy it within our district [competition estimated between 5,000 and 8,000 access points]. Thus, giving us a great cost savings and on the back-end, a great maintenance and operations savings to our year-to-year budgets."

"We narrowed it down to two vendors, and we did a battery of tests against both vendors in house on their equipment," said Mitch Mitchell, senior enterprise systems engineer at Plano ISD. "We did video streaming, throughput testing, usability testing, and also testing on the management side to make sure that whatever we selected we would be able to manage it in our environment."

Source: Xirrus