Any large boarding schools out there?

[1066girl]

I run an IT department in a large boarding school on the south coast.

 

At our Senior School, we have 800 students, around 300 are boarders and 200 staff.

 

We have spent the last two years upgrading our network after years of no investment. New servers, PCs, additional cabling, fibre between buildings, upgraded HP switches, increased broadband connectivity, Meraki APs, 2 x Smoothwall Firewalls, etc. I understand this is a dream for some schools as I previously worked in a school with practically zero budget. However, with this comes other challenges!

 

Many of our boarders have at least three wifi devices. All our staff and students wifi traffic has to be authenticated and we stop VPN traffic other than SSL. We use Office365, but all other educational services are on site at the moment.

 

Most days over 1500 users are logged into wifi (staff and students). In one boarding house alone, I have over 500 wifi clients connected split over 5 APs!

 

75% of our traffic is MAC/iOS, 12% Windows and the rest is Android and other devices.

 

We have one 1Gb school2school link between our senior and off site prep school, then we have a 1Gb connection from the Prep which is a DR line and are in the middle of replacing the existing 100Mb and 300Mb connections at the Senior School with 1Gb and 1Gb connections. I am just waiting for contracts to come up this year. This will mean less traffic will need to cross the school2school link. Currently our 100Mb connection is reserved for telephony traffic and the remaining traffic is split across the 1Gb and 300Mb connections. Looking at the Meraki geographic access point chart, only a handful of devices were showing over-use and so more have been placed in these areas (such as the 500+ users above).

 

Our wifi traffic, which is predominantly our area of contention, is processing 7.5 Tb of data per day (average over 12 months). Because we still have around 30 old APs to replace for Meraki, we haven't yet been able to implement any of the management tools that might help us, although through the cloud console, we discovered one student had downloaded 250Gb of data in one evening! Others were downloading in excess of 50Gb in that same evening. We have therefore put 1Mb/sec limits on 4HD and gaming traffic to allow other students half a chance of even getting on the wifi!

 

I am interested to hear from other schools to hear what they do around quotas, restricting devices and/or traffic types. I am also keen to know what other schools are doing to manage high levels of traffic. Is our traffic typical for boarding schools? I previously worked in commercial organizations and never saw this level of traffic day after day (peaks, yes but not constant). I appreciate there are probably much more experienced infrastructure guys on this forum, so I am putting a message out there to you guys....

 

I would appreciate other schools in a similar position to PM me to share some information in order that I might see if our situation is typical and check we aren't missing any major tricks to get a handle on this!

 

Thanks in advance

[elsiegee40]

@Andrew_C perhaps ?

[Andrew_C]

Afraid I'm only a "one step up from a user" here.

 

We are currently upgrading all of our network, but I don't know any details (other than Aerohive APs are going in around me as I type)

[elsiegee40]

There's definitely at least 1 from Tonbridge School on here, but I can't remember a posting name

[1066girl]

Thanks, I will hope they see my post.