Inspired Education Group
Wireless AP Refresh for Inspired Education sites across the UK
A big part of GGRs partnership with our customers is introducing the latest technology at the right time to bring maximum benefit to our client’s businesses. Managing lifecycle well protects against security threats and ensures the latest features are leveraged as early as possible where the pace of technology development is always accelerating. Our longstanding customer, Inspired Education, use a GGR managed wireless solution to underpin teaching and learning across 15 schools in the UK. Our expert team worked throughout the half-term break to complete vital wireless lifecycle refreshes without impacting school operations, replacing hardware approaching it’s end of service with the latest models.
Customer Partnership
GGR Communications has a long history working with both Inspired and their predecessor Alpha Plus. The well-established group of schools has a track record of delivering on its founding principle; to provide a gold standard of education to its pupils. Part of delivering on that promise requires using the right technology tools to provide a service that is reliable, robust and secure – tailored to the unique requirements of each school. Maximising teaching time is paramount, meaning networks are not just important, they’re vital.
This is where GGR come in…
With over 7 years of partnership with Inspired to date, GGR continue to make it our mission to know them, their objectives and their technology inside out. In the early days of this partnership, this meant transitioning to the Cisco Meraki cloud managed Wi-Fi platform to bring unparalleled network visibility across their estate. This was transformational for performance, management and troubleshooting whilst also creating a secure foundation for the future. Managed by GGR, this platform has helped to drastically reduce network issues and provided stability for the schools to run smoothly.
The Project
Whilst the Meraki dashboard platform only gets better over time as new features are provided automatically, all hardware has a natural lifecycle, which we help our customers plan for. Armed with our customer knowledge and deep technical expertise, we created a rolling lifecycle plan to ensure total visibility for the IT team and budget holders on what investment is required when. In line with our collaborative lifecycle plan, older APs, solid workhorses for several years, were replaced with the latest Cisco Meraki 9000 series units. These APs bring the latest Wi-Fi 7 standard, maximising speed and reducing latency in a world where device density is on the increase and applications are becoming more bandwidth intensive day by day.
The Approach
In every project we undertake, risk and impact of disruption is as assessed, and where possible avoided. In some cases, such as replacing a wireless access point, service interruption can not be avoided, only minimised. GGR Communications always work closely with their customers to find periods where these types of changes can be made with minimum impact. For schools such as those in the Inspired group, this means making the most of school breaks. During the half-term period, when students and teachers are having some respite from studying, the engineering team at GGR Communications was hard at work conducting wireless access point replacements across approximately half of Inspired’s schools:
Inspired Sites worked across during project
Wireless Access points deployed
Upgrade of internal and outdoor APs
The Outcome
Inspired’s schools are now fully up to date with the latest Wi-Fi standards, bringing enhanced performance and the ability to cope with the demands of teaching and learning for years to come. These crucial updates also keep each of these sites secure with the latest security patches and updates. Students and teachers alike continue to experience secure uninterrupted learning across their sites.
