Burke County Schools Adds Support for Wi-Fi 6 Devices
- By Dian Schaffhauser
- 10/28/21
Earlier this year, a
school district in North Carolina refreshed its wireless network, to
support devices with Wi-Fi 6 capacity — before they began appearing
in classrooms. Burke
County Public Schools distributed 1,500 new access
points to its 27 schools, using equipment from Cambium
Networks (previously Xirrus).
In a recently
published case
study on the project, district CIO Melanie Honeycutt
said the rollout of the new APs would "allow students to connect
quicker than some of the older technology" and enable a full
classroom to stream videos simultaneously.
The district also
uses Cambium's XMS
to monitor and troubleshoot the network. Recently, noted Honeycutt, a
new school was having a connectivity problem. "With XMS, we were
able to immediately see that the issue was clearly not in the
wireless network. It was our mobile device management," she
explained. "By utilizing the system tools, [the WAN engineer]
was able to immediately resolve the issue without having to send a
technician into the classroom, which was ideal."
Honeycutt emphasized
that while the new APs would "change the performance of the
system in every learning environment in the district," they
wouldn't change how the learning was done. "The only place it
might affect us would be in our elementary school where there are a
lot of older devices, which will soon be upgraded. By having a Wi-Fi
6 network in place, that transition will be smooth."
About the Author
Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.