Moray Council
Modernising and future proofing Wired and Wireless networks for Schools across an entire Scottish County
Moray Council is the Local Government for Moray in the North-East of Scotland. As well as running the Corporate network, they also look after the Educational network consisting of eight High Schools & forty six Primary Schools across the county.
They’re tech savvy and see the importance of providing pupils and teachers with a strong and secure wireless network, however, with so many schools to cater for and a hardware setup approaching obsolescence, they needed to bring in the experts.
Moray Council utilised Juniper products to deliver wireless services to their Corporate and Education environments, however, Juniper announced that they will no longer be developing their range of wireless products.
Although It was unlikely to cause any immediate issues, it did raise concerns regarding the direction that the council should take going forward. In addition to the issues around the Juniper products, the services that they needed to provide via wireless have widened along with the reliance on the network.
With this in mind, Moray Council approached several Wireless providers to provide initial roadmap options for a modernised and future proof WiFi network to be deployed across their schools.
No mean feat given that they already had 237 Access Points across 56 sites!
After trialling Ruckus Wireless across our sites, we found their products outperformed all others, and we've been suitably impressed ever since - both with Ruckus as a vendor and Haptic Networks with their expertise.
"After speaking to Moray Council and proposing various solutions it was quickly apparent that Ruckus Wireless was the best fit for the project.
We were able to provide relevant demo equipment on a trial/test basis and set up a Proof of Concept for both the Corporate and Educational networks. The results were much better than the previous Juniper solution and Moray Council decided opt for the Ruckus solution.
In fact Moray Council were so impressed with the performance that they added Ruckus into the public areas – such as Libraries and Town Halls – across the County. Haptic Networks suggested that Purple be added as an overlay for these areas as a social authentication.
This meant that Moray Council could have a full report on the users in these areas and reach out to them both with public information and marketing.
With this number of AP’s to install, Haptic Networks deployed a team of 4 engineers to Scotland for 2 weeks to assist with the cabling in each school and the installation of the Access Points.
