stevehead

I've installed Extricom into 4 Plymouth schools and it supports 30 users in any class. These are thin clients, so demand a constant and uninterupted connection. (netbooks to Win Tserver2003) PM me for more info - I don't want to post the school names on a public forum as they may not appreciate the attention. Steve Head

Well.. usually. In my experience some electrical circuits allow Homeplug signals to jump phases entirely, and some are 99% isolated. It depends on whether the system has high pass filtering, and you don't really know 'till you try.

Try this: Get the Solwise 85mbps wifi homeplug device and stick it in a locked box in your pavilion. This looks like a wallwart psu with an antenna on top. Connect the pavilions' 240v supply to another homeplug adapter back at the main school power distro board - jumper this to main school network infrastructure. When pavilion WiFi is needed, just plug the wifi adapter into an available mains socket and blam - instant wireless! I've used homeplug on links to temp classrooms 150m from the school, much easier than a wifi bridge in all respects.

Disable your wireless card and plug into an ethernet port. This way you can determine if it's a wifi or PC issue.

Why doesn't anyone use the 'a' bands? A cheap way of doing it is to put 'a' cards in all the roaming laptops (staff and such like). Put up a load of consumer grade overlapping 'a' Access Points to support these - they'll always be a lo density 'a' band hummm. Then stick 3 'g' band cheapo (but choice, the WAP54G comes to mind) on top of the laptop trolley. A 5 port Switch, then cable to a free ethernet port in whichever classroom it ends up in. That'll give you 60Mbps of WiFi in whichever room you like. The 'a' band rocks for cell planning; sorely overlooked.

Mod: Plz move if I'm causing this thread to go OT. Yeah I've really grown just a bit fond of 'em. I have issues with the way schools are buying more and more laptops 'cos even though they're cheap these days, they give poor value due to low availability. About 6 months ago I put 15 Thin Client Laptops into another little school. These are called NEC TCM160's - look like a laptop but boot from a flash disk and run XPe. These have been incredibly successful. First and foremost is battery life. They come out of the charging trolley at 9.00 and run all (school) day on battery. Now that's good value. Once set up, these can't be messed with so zero maintenance. Staff Training consisted of "make sure the radio is on and it's charged". The school also has 2 suites of Wyse V10L wired Thin Clients, so the kids see exactly the same desktop etc. whether they have a portable or not. For wireless support, I moved all existing laptops up onto the 'A' bands and run 2 'b/g' band Linksys AP's in designated areas for decent connectivity. I was very lucky with the layout of the school as I managed to get quite a clean set of overlaps. The TCM160's all work together and quickly too. Wouldn't work on a large site though, so back to Extricom for you guys with campuses to contend with. The EeePC will tread a bit lighter on my network due to it's small screen size as screen data Updates are smaller.

Hi, just joined, and I've just installed an Extricom system this weekend in a very small Primary School. I had the pleasure of a very generous budget to provide 'visionary' IT into 4 classrooms and an 8 station computer suite. The story so far... The school already has 8 failing XP Workstations, 25 WiFi XP Laptops less than a year old and 8 staff WiFi Laptops. They get 2 hours a week support from the local Community College - that's it! So first off to keep things manageable I installed a hefty Terminal Server with Virtual CD ROM Services. Onto this I loaded up all the Curriculum Software and CD Images. Then beefed up the infrastructure by replacing 100Mbps Hubs with Gigabit Switches. Replaced all 8 XP Workstations with Wyse TCX Multimedia Enabled Terminals (the V10L). No more hassle in the Computer Suite! Installed 2 X Extricom 404 Units (8 dual channel radios). The radios are co-located, 2 in each classroom. There are 4 available channel 'blankets'; 1, 6, 11 in 2.4GHz and CH36 in the 'A' Band. Into this radio swamp, I'm throwing another 38 Linux EeePC's (4Gb / 512Mb), all on 2.4GHz. (I did try installing a a/b/g card into the EeePC, but gave up as impractical.) Staff Laptops are all on the 'A' Band. The EeePC... these run the standard 'Easy Mode' Xandros which has been modified to remove any customising features to stop tinkering but MUCH more importantly, have 2 new Icons in 'Work'. These are both Terminal Services Icons, which connect the EeePC to the Curriculum Terminal Server. One is an Internet Shortcut optimised for connecting from home, and the other is a Network Shortcut, optimised for WiFI LAN Connections. The Terminal Server connection allows pupils to login to their Windows Domain to access all data and Windows Apps, and maps the EeePC Document folder to My Computer for moving files to and from the EeePC's if needed. I can't complete this story because, well, you try sourcing 38 EeePC's. Coming Mid March apparently. I do expect the Extracom Network to support 50 odd WiFI devices densely packed into the 4 classrooms in a random arrangement; if Extricom can't do it then I'm stuffed! Note that this is much tougher than standard XP Laptops which just 'blip' the network when requesting web pages etc. All 38 EeePC's will be hitting the Terminal Server constantly - a bit like 38 VOIP Calls that never end. Will it work, or will it collapse in a pile of marketing guff? Tune in next month......