forkies

Unifi directly.

I am open to opinion. Just my opinion is that for a school, the costs of hardware is vastly over priced and many features the schools don't need, or have the sufficient manpower to maintain. When Unifi release their stacking capability shortly, it would be interesting to see the price difference to other providers. Again, I personally think that for a school, where 5 minutes of downtime wont mean the end of the world, or loss of significant earnings in a commercial sales company, or emergency services, the features provided (i.e. MC-LAGS etc.) are more than sufficient and meet the gov standards for schools.

For a school, usually a MC-LAG and Unifi's centralised management would cater for the features of a stack. Although stacking is coming soon to Unifi if you are running extremely high bandwidth for example and need that 40Gb+ backplane. Although on other threads people are saying bandwidth isnt peaking much over 2Gb, but I appreciate some school somewhere may have 20GB+ consistent bandwidth to manage.

What level of SLA would you get with a FTTP service and upload speeds? With more reliance on cloud services, including MIS systems and cloud storage of documents, I would want to ensure a good SLA and backup line which is in the guidance. We have a backup 1Gb line going a different route out the school, and terminating in a separate building.

Not surprised as they don't make enough mark up on it, and no ongoing income for license free. When you can self install as well. True, but if they need any features not offered by Unifi then they likely have the budget to match the needs. I cannot see a academy/state secondary or primary school needing anything Unifi doesn't offer right now.

We have a 10Gb leased line. Access to internal servers (if you haven't gone cloud). Might as well go wifi 7 on your desktops to save on cabling, as upgrading cabling to meet standards for desktops will cost more.

Have you considered Unifi? Much cheaper and no ongoing high licensing costs. I think there was a bulletin from NCSC recently about TP Link being compromised, but that might just be their routers. We historically were Meraki way back, didn't think much of it. We had Aruba at core after upgrading from our old HP switching, but again, not much if any benefit over Unifi from the costs. I cannot comment on Cambium as never seen it in use in any education environment near us. Most people were Aruba or Meraki but have switched to Unifi to meet budgets and still have all the features needed as an education establishment.

Yes we hit 2Gbps wireside for some APs regularly, mainly in the sixth form areas. Peak traffic on our Internet today was 3Gbps. Currently we have 36 devices on 6GHz of which 25 are WiFi 6E and 11 are WiFi 7. 203 devices on 5GHz, this is at lesson changeover. Average stats for these clients show 262 Mbps download, 22.5 Mbps upload. Internet is currently hitting 1.6Gbps throughput. We have had no complaints about WiFi since we upgraded to the latest standards. Before this upgrade, we were having issues probably weekly, that was a 8 year old Unifi deployment.

Good point, no point buying and installing U7 Pros for example without the correct switching. We upgraded all our WiFi side switching as part of the project to enable at least 2.5Gbps to each AP, and in some places 10Gbps to the AP as required depending on model, and PoE+ up to PoE++ IEEE 802.3af.bt as required by the APs.

It says WiFi 6E as a minimum. Not 6. WiFi 6E gives you 6GHz, WiFi 6 doesn’t have 6GHz. Again depends if you are going to meet the standard or mark it as unmet on the annual return. Do you have devices or will you have devices that support 6GHz and be able to utilise it in the next X years until you refresh your WiFi again. from the gov page, it links to the WiFi standard: Wi-Fi 6E certification as part of Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 6 offers the features and capabilities of Wi-Fi 6, extended to the 6 GHz band. Wi-Fi 6E delivers improvements that enable Wi-Fi devices to operate efficiently in the most dense, bandwidth-intensive, and dynamic connectivity environments.

WiFi 6e is 6GHz. Below is the extract from the page, under the Use the latest wireless network standards section. Yes it is "should" not "must", at this time anyway.

We found the actual USB C cable being the only issue we came up against when implementing USB-C docking stations in every classroom a few years back for staff. You have to get the right replacement cable if they get damaged, otherwise they either don't charge or don't run data, or sometimes both. We were buying replacements of a specific cable which we never had an issue with, however that cable has gone from everywhere so looking at buying a few different options to test before we bulk buy again. Initially we were running docks that ran the displaylink as the older laptops in our fleet didnt support display port alt mode, which added cost to certain areas, but I imagine most schools now have hardware that supports this natively.

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/meeting-digital-and-technology-standards-in-schools-and-colleges/wireless-network-core-standard

I guess it depends how the budget is managed by your leadership team, we are all but one criteria away from meeting the standards but have always been able to manage the budget allocation to ensure a rolling replacement cycle for all of our assets. We wouldn't like to be the only school in the area that gets a management visit from DfE for not meeting the standards, not great PR and brings into question if the IT team have managed their assets and budget effectively, and provided correct guidance to the school leadership. As always, the Government is providing schools with the money, it is how the school spends it, schools should be able to meet all standards in their eyes. I think DfE are realising a lot of schools haven't managed their estates very well (buildings) and putting more ownership on schools to look after them. IT is a major part of any business, and not having updated, modern and secure systems is also costing them money. Leadership teams and Board of Trustees need to balance between fancy purchases that don't last long, have minimal impact or that get replaced when someone leaves and someone else starts with a different system/product because they "used it in their last school", and instead ensuring the school has modern assets that are fit for purpose.

You must not forget you must be Meeting digital and technology standards in schools and colleges - Wireless network: core standard - Guidance - GOV.UK by year 2030, which includes "You should ask your supplier or IT support to provide a wireless solution that uses, at a minimum, the Wi-Fi 6E standard." and to meet that standard you must have Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) 6GHz compatible wireless access points. Even if your current end user devices don't support it now, doesn't mean you shouldn't be future proofing. If you are spending money, why put in something that doesn't support the minimum standards you will need in 4 years time, when you will end up having to replace it all before then to meet standards. We rolled out U7 Pro and U7 Pro Max APs in the summer, and we are very pleased with them, no issues at all with only 5GHz and 6GHz. DfE have said if you are not meeting the standards by 2030, DfE could arrange a targeted visit to the school to determine why it was not met and provide management guidance on meeting the standards as part of the new addition to the annual returns. This is part of the estates management update they are implementing. Then it could be taken out of your hands.