BROADBAND COMMUNITIES is the leading source of information on digital and broadband technologies for buildings and communities. Our editorial aims to accelerate the deployment of Fiber-To-The-Home and Fiber-To-The-Premises.
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76 | BROADBAND COMMUNITIES | www.broadbandcommunities.com | JULY 2015 FIBER AND WIRELESS DEPLOYMENT Holy Cross High School Graduates to a New Network A generous gift allowed a private high school to upgrade its antiquated network infrastructure. The result: a future-proof network plus educational benefts. By Masha Zager / Broadband Communities H oly Cross High School in Waterbury, Conn., is a college preparatory school with 730 students from around the region. It has an intensive academic program (nearly all students go on to college), a successful athletic program and a thriving arts program. Until recently, however, it didn't have up-to-date technology. Its campus network was 15 years old, built on an ad-hoc infrastructure whose accessibility and capacity were limited. Over time, IT staf had patched up the network with donated equipment, usually to fx urgent problems. Students and administrators needed a better solution. An opportunity arose in December 2013 when an anonymous donor gave the school a transformational gift of $3.4 million. Te gift allowed Holy Cross to address several aspects of its strategic plan, including upgrades to facilities, programs and infrastructure. One important infrastructure project to which gift funds were applied was an upgrade of the campus network, including ISP, structured cabling, switching and the wired and wireless Internet network. School IT personnel knew what they needed, but they didn't have the skills to design and implement the upgrade. Timothy McDonald, the school president, says, "It was evident that we had exhausted internal expertise and were at the point where we recognized it was time to go outside. We needed a solutions provider that understood the complexities of a private school that includes students, faculty and staf all accessing the Internet at diferent times in the day, on diferent devices, in a variety of diferent places in the building." Enter RESOLUTE Partners – a frm based in Southington, Conn., that engineers, installs, operates and maintains wired and wireless networks. RESOLUTE won the opportunity to engineer a unifed solution to deliver on-demand wireless Internet access to the Holy Cross campus and all the students, faculty, staf and guests. SITE REVIEW RESOLUTE began by doing a thorough site review. Tis was an opportunity for engineers to visit the campus, determine the locations that would deliver the required level of Wi-Fi coverage throughout the school, and decide what hardware was needed to meet the school's capacity demands. "We performed both physical analysis and logical analysis to determine where the heaviest requirements were," says Frank DeMasi, RESOLUTE vice president of information technology. Te team identifed several distinct coverage areas, along with the functions performed in each area and their intensity of network usage. For example, science rooms require more network capacity than language rooms because students use more virtual books and wireless projectors in science classes and tend to stream more information from the Internet in real