Danish Municipality Standardizes on Aerohive Wireless LANs to Meet Rising Capacity and Coverage Demands in Schools

Sunnyvale, Calif.– August 31, 2011 - Aerohive Networks, the pioneer in controller-less Wi-Fi and cloud-enabled networking, today announced that the Danish municipality of Faxe has chosen and deployed Aerohive WLANs for use in all its schools. 

Faxe Kommune, supported by ICT partner Jysk Data Networks, selected Aerohive for its technical superiority over competitive solutions, and has deployed WLANs throughout its 11 school sites, which together service the educational needs of 4,200 students aged 6-16 years.

News Facts

  • Faxe Kommune had been presiding over a patchwork of WLAN systems, created over time to support investments in mobile IT suites at each school, and urgently sought an efficient means of delivering its new coherent strategy for universal wireless access.
     
  • Demand for wireless access was also driven by the evolution toward shared educational assets being predominantly hosted online, rather than locally, which is facilitated in Denmark by the government’s ‘UniLogin’ resource.  Moreover, students were increasingly bringing their own laptops into school and expecting network and internet access.
     
  • Prior to engaging Aerohive, Faxe Kommune was certain that its chosen path would be to follow a controller-led architecture solution for WLAN.  However, a pilot of the Aerohive technology reversed those perceptions, and demonstrated the lower-cost, ease of deployment and ease of management benefits from Aerohive’s controller-less approach.
     
  • Concerns around planning adequate capacity for the growing use of video-based content was a major reason for selecting Aerohive.
     
  • The 11 schools are linked together with the help of Aerohive’s L2 VPN so that the quantity, and cost, of active equipment is minimised. A single HiveManager network management system is deployed at one of the larger schools to provide remote configuration capabilities to every AP in the municipality.  Teachers and IT tutors use Aerohive’s unique TeacherView application to manage student access to the Internet and the LAN with a single click from the teacher’s PC.
     
  • In the future, Faxe Kommune is confident at being able to scale further capacity and coverage simply and cost effectively. 
     
  • To read the full Faxe Kommune case study, please visit http://www.aerohive.com/resources/faxe-kommune-municipal-schools

Comments

“The simplicity of configuration with Aerohive was outstanding, and the comparative costs of licenses, operation and maintenance – and the costs of future expansion - were all very compelling as well,” said Lars Sørensen, Head of School IT at Faxe Kommune.

“Aerohive’s mesh networking capabilities are also really important because it means we don’t have to wire many of the APs – they can be completely independent, which makes them cheaper and faster to set-up and operate.  Also, the VLAN separation has proved critical for us; today we have a VLAN for the school laptops, one for privately owned pupil laptops to access the Internet and UniLogin, and another for guest access.” 

“Even with 1,500 pupils online at any one time, we estimate our available wireless capacity is around twice that of what we currently need,” concludes Lars.

About Aerohive Networks

Aerohive Networks reduces the cost and complexity of today’s networks with cloud-enabled, distributed Wi-Fi and routing solutions for enterprises and medium sized companies including branch offices and teleworkers. Aerohive’s award-winning cooperative control Wi-Fi architecture, public or private cloud-enabled network management, routing and VPN solutions eliminate costly controllers and single points of failure. This gives its customers mission critical reliability with granular security and policy enforcement and the ability to start small and expand without limitations. Aerohive was founded in 2006 and is headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif. The company's investors include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Northern Light Venture Capital and New Enterprise Associates, Inc. (NEA). For more information, please visit www.aerohive.com, call us at 408-510-6100, follow us on Twitter @Aerohive, subscribe to our blog or become a fan on our Facebook page.

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