Homewood School and Aruba Wireless

Centrally Managed Wireless Technology live at Kent’s largest School Campus

KMH Group have successfully deployed a state-of-the-art, centrally managed wireless environment for Homewood School & 6th Form Centre, Tenterden, near Ashford in Kent.

Homewood School is the largest secondary school in Kent, with over 2000 student users and where each teacher has a mobile computing device. Fourteen buildings provide in excess of 180 teaching rooms, over approximately 118000sq ft/36000sq metre’s, all connected over a HP switched 1Gb fibre network.

 

KMH working closely with EIS, Kent County Councils education technology business unit to design install and configure a WLAN 802.11b/g solution using the market leading, Aruba Mobility Controller, Aruba Mobility Software and ultra thin Aruba Access Points across the entire school campus.

The Aruba Networks system reduces the equipment needed to provide a WLAN, with the Aruba Mobility Controller utilising the schools own managed Microsoft Server Active Directory (AD), IAS (Radius) and Certification Server structure to ensure Secure User Authentication, Authorisation and Accounting. The Aruba Mobility Software provides the ‘engine’ to support the latest encryption services, such as WPA/TKIP and WPA2/AES protocols.

KMH and the Aruba managed wireless technology will continue to play a crucial part in the on-going development in schools across Kent and is also of particular interest to Kent County Council’s wider education aims of making wireless mobile computing available to schools in Kent, reducing support costs and simplifying the creation of a secure wide area wireless network.