Unna School District Selects Aruba's Wireless Network

Unna School District in Germany’s Ruhr Valley has selected and deployed Aruba Networks’ (News - Alert) 802.11n wireless networks across the first five of its 21 schools as part of the district’s innovative Unit21 project. 

Unit21 is a virtual educational campus destination for the district’s 10,000 students, each of whom will be provided with a laptop computer supported by 802.11n Wi-Fi access, network security and content filtering, and a service data center. 

According to Aruba officials, the 802.11n wireless networks deliver an average of 280Mbps, allowing teachers and students to utilize the most modern e-learning applications. 

The company officials said that the wireless networks will ultimately be deployed across all 21 of the district’s schools, and were installed and are managed by Aruba partner Akcay-Schwarz Consulting.

According to Uwe Kornatz, head of the Unna School District, Akcay-Schwarz Consulting’s Managed Learning system, currently serves over 2,000 laptops equipped with wireless interfaces. 

“The new Aruba high-speed 802.11n wireless network extends across the campuses of five district schools, and provides pervasive indoor and outdoor wireless coverage to link students with the Unit21 data center,” said Kornatz.

Hans Ruthmann, head of the Gesamtschule Königsborn secondary school, said that a high speed wireless network removes many of the obstacles to implementing a Managed Learning system. 

“Our teachers are no longer limited to accessing e-learning systems from one or two specific locations and this provides them with a much more flexible working environment,” said Ruthmann. 

He said that the solution from Akcay-Schwarz Consulting and Aruba allows the teachers to concentrate fully on their teaching and removes a major administrative burden.

“e-Learning involves much more than simply connecting computers to the Internet,” said Juergen Schwarz, managing director of Akcay-Schwarz Consulting.

Schwarz said that with this solution, the teacher has complete control over the working environment of the student, from laptop to printer, and is even able to take control of the laptop if necessary. 

It is also easy to ensure that the latest security and anti-virus updates are applied to all users connected to the network, greatly improving network security, he added.

“Unna schools have a user density that far exceeds the norm found even in large enterprises, with up to 1,300 laptops used within a radius of just 200 meters,” said Frank Vossmoeller, Aruba’s sales manager for Northern Germany. 

Vossmoeller said that this is far beyond the capacity of many enterprise wireless LANs, not to mention consumer-grade wireless gear. Providing reliable Wi-Fi connectivity to such a high density of laptops requires the very sophisticated, field-proven radio management techniques found in our ARM (News - Alert) technology. The result is wire-like performance and rock-solid stability – the very characteristics needed for a successful e-learning program, he said. 

Aruba’s 802.11n networks provide a solid foundation on which the Unit 21 services can be delivered and managed.