Wavelink Case Studies

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Public Schools Choose Wavelink To Manage District-Wide WLAN Infrastructure

Wireless Mobility Adds Flexibility for North Carolina´s Largest School District

Over 113,000 students attend school in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg public schools. They´re served by 148 elementary, middle and high schools spread throughout the sprawling urban school district.

Providing basic network connectivity and computing facilities for all those schools is a tall order. The district has recently turned to wireless LAN technology to extend computing resources to more students, teachers, and administrative staff with greater flexibility. And they selected Wavelink to manage the growing wireless infrastructure.

"Students and teachers want connectivity, they don´t care whether it´s by wire or wireless as long as it works," says Duane Alles, Senior Network Engineer with the school district´s IT group. "For providing basic connectivity - email, word-processing, spreadsheet, and file sharing - WiFi works great."

The district has installed approximately 250 Cisco Aironet Access Points (APs) in over 75 schools to date. Most recently, Alles has been working on a major project to equip all of the district´s mobile classrooms (trailers that can be moved from school to school as enrollment shifts) with wireless computing equipment.

"There will be a total of 540 mobile classrooms," Alles explains. "We want to provide connectivity to all of them so students that are in a mobile unit have the same advantages as students in the main buildings. It´s been a real challenge because they move the mobile units around every year."

Managing Mobility Saves Time and Money

Alles selected Wavelink Mobile Manager 5.5 to manage the district´s rapidly growing WLAN infrastructure. "It´s easy to use and it´s a big time saver," says Alles. "It saves a lot of time for configuration set up, and Mobile Manager makes it a lot easier to access the AP interface. I can do ten or twenty firmware upgrades now with Mobile Manager in the same time it took me to do one without it. So the economy of scale is important especially when you have 50 or more APs to configure in one school."

While mobile classrooms are the latest application of wireless technology in the school district, they are not the first. There are already two full schools served entirely by the district´s rapidly growing wireless network infrastructure.

"We have wireless throughout one Middle School and one High School," says Alles, "and there are some older school district buildings where it would be too expensive to run cabling, so we use WiFi instead. If we have a school that is due for major renovation in two years, it makes a lot of sense to use wireless instead of installing a lot of cables. When it comes time for the renovation, we can pull the wireless out and redeploy it much more easily and economically."

In addition, many schools in the district extend the flexibility of their computing resources with wireless mobile computer carts popularly called COWs (Computers On Wheels).

"Those wireless carts get a huge amount of use. Each cart has 18 laptops and a wireless AP" Alles explains. "They use them to set up a computing lab pretty much wherever they need one. A classroom that may have only one or two hardwired workstations can plug the AP from that cart into an Ethernet jack on the wall and provide computers for 18 more students."

Alles says some schools in the district have as many as ten of these carts in use during the school year. He estimates there were nearly a thousand wireless laptops and desktops in use throughout the school district last year. And the numbers continue to grow.

Central Management Provides Essential Control

To manage wireless access across all the different schools throughout the district´s extensive computer network, Charlotte-Mecklenburg uses a single instance of Wavelink Mobile Manager running on a Windows 2000 server. "We have a number of workstations that can access Mobile Manager on that server," Alles explains.

"I leave Mobile Manager up on my workstation to give me a quick visual check of how the network is doing. The control panel will tell me when an AP goes down and where it´s down," says Alles who uses Mobile Manager´s control panel to organize the district´s wireless workload. "Each school has its own folder with all the associated access points - one folder per school."

And Mobile Manger has helped Alles troubleshoot some pesky Wide Area Network problems as well. "The email notification feature in Mobile Manager has been very helpful," he says. "It helped us know when some of the WAN connection links were down. I´d get an email saying that we´d lost connectivity to several access points. That really helped us uncover some troublesome intermittent problems."

As new wireless network infrastructure continues to grow throughout the school district, Alles expects Mobile Manager will play an increasingly important role.

"We´re going to be installing a lot of new access points with the roll out of all these mobile units. When we move mobile units around at the beginning of a new school year, all those access points will need to be reconfigured. Mobile Manger makes it easy."

ABOUT WAVELINK

Wavelink Corporation is a leading provider of wireless communications software and the developer of a wireless platform that enables enterprises to develop, manage and deploy wireless applications. Since 1992, Wavelink´s innovative software has powered a growing number of Fortune 1,000 companies and is rapidly becoming a standard in wireless network development, deployment and management, with more than 40,000 installations in over 50 countries. Wavelink supports the world´s most popular programming languages and device operating systems, and has extended its expertise from wireless local area networks (WLAN) to the wireless wide area networks (WWAN) space. For more information, please visit www.wavelink.com or call +1-425-823-0111.