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Fairfax County Public Schools Manages More Than 7,000 Wireless Access Points



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Nov 1, 2006, News Report

With more than 164,000 students enrolled in more than 220 schools, Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) is the largest school district in the state of Virginia and the thirteenth largest in the United States. It also has a reputation as an innovator in using technology to enrich the classroom experience. Several years ago, FCPS established a goal of providing wireless broadband access to every classroom in the district. As a result, FCPS today operates a network of more than 7,000 Cisco wireless access points, making its wireless LAN one of the largest in the world.

By using AirWave Management Platform (AMP) software the district's network engineers and help desk staff use a web-based interface to configure and monitor the wireless networks in remote school buildings. While the software is distributed on multiple servers for maximum efficiency and scalability, the master console provides an integrated user interface with visibility to the entire network.

"We selected AMP because it was the only solution that could provide us with a single management console from which to manage a network of this size and complexity," said Neal Shelton, FCPS' Network Engineering Supervisor. "With thousands of devices to manage in hundreds of schools located miles apart, we needed a centralized solution to automate routine processes like configuration management and firmware distribution," he added.

With thousands of simultaneous network users, FCPS' user support staff can receive hundreds of wireless-related support calls in a month. Using the software, the Network Engineering team can view historical trend reports as well as detailed real-time information on every user and device on the network, even generating RF maps showing their location on a building floor plan.

While FCPS' IT staff needed a single console to manage its vast network, they also wanted to provide clear visibility to network usage to network administrators and managers. "The school district and the residents of Fairfax County made a substantial investment in wireless technology on behalf of our students and teachers," said Matt Fry, Wireless Network Engineer. "It's very important to maintain transparency and visibility, to show them how that investment is being used in the schools." The new "Executive Portal" feature in the software, developed with input from FCPS, allows officials from outside the IT department to browse to a web page on the FCPS intranet to view real-time and historical data on wireless network usage district-wide and on a school-by-school basis.

KW

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