Wi-Fi support and managed services for a university

At this leading bricks-and-mortar university in Sydney, the Wi-Fi service delivers network and internet access to more than 26,000 students and staff each day. It’s required to be operational across the campus, reliable and accessible everywhere, all the time.

Managing and supporting such a large piece of infrastructure effectively and efficiently takes specialist skills and focus. With resources already stretched, the university wanted a more cost-effective and practical solution for managing this critical ICT service.

In addition, the university wanted to keep abreast of the fast-paced changes that were taking place in the mobility and WLAN marketplaces. For example, users were constantly upgrading their mobile devices, so the university had to ensure that its Wi-Fi infrastructure could keep up.

Over many years, Frame has assisted the university with several voice, wireless and network-related consulting, design and implementation engagements. Because of these successes, the university engaged Frame for WLAN support and advisory services.

Students and staff now have dependable Wi-Fi service across the campus. And with Frame managing and supporting this service, the university has renewed confidence in its ability to deliver reliable and scalable Wi-Fi.

Without Frame’s specialist knowledge and skills, the university would not be getting the same usage insights nor be capable of maintaining infrastructure which is able to keep up with changes in the industry and needs of its users. Additionally, Frame’s service was approximately 40% less expensive than if the university had attempted to provide the same service internally.

Frame started delivering the service in 2012 and still provides it today. This enables the university to focus valuable internal resources elsewhere. More importantly, the university is able to respond to the ever-changing demands of its mobile users.

And with timely information about the Wi-Fi infrastructure, how it’s performing and the demand being placed on it, the university has the insight needed to support decisions about expanding and evolving the service.

The university required reactive support services for when incidents arose with the Wi-Fi infrastructure in order to maintain the stability of the system, as well as system health checks and moves, adds and changes.

In addition, the university wanted to ensure its Wi-Fi infrastructure strategy was the correct one for its future requirements and changing user needs.

To assist the university achieve these requirements, Frame operates the following support functions:

• incident management, including daily system health checks and monitoring
• service configuration
• performance and capacity management
• security management
• monthly executive service reporting, including recommendations
• onsite access point replacements
• weekly system enhancements
• firmware updates to wireless network
• account management meetings
• quarterly wireless technology roadmap reviews and presentations.