The majority of the district devices connect to our network over wireless. Every year we expand our wireless coverage to support more devices and greater demand. Currently the district has 384 wireless access points to provide wireless connectivity.

Wireless Access Points

Laptops, Chromebooks and iPads connect to the network using wireless access points. Each access point has six antennas, can support up to 50 wireless devices each and has a built-in spectrum analyzer to detect interfering devices. Careful planning and design goes into the placement of each wireless access point to ensure proper coverage. Unlike wireless access points one would get for home use the majority of the intelligence and functionality resides in a wireless controller that each access point requires constant access to function. This greatly simplifies administration of the wireless networks.

Wireless LAN Controllers

The district owns four wireless controllers to manage and support all of their wireless access points. Two of the wireless controllers share the wireless loads across the district and two are in hot standby for redundancy in case one or both of the primary controllers fail.

Cisco Prime

All management of wireless networks, wireless access points, wireless LAN controllers and clients are performed in Cisco Prime. Prime is a piece of software that gives us great visibility into what our network equipment, clients (laptops, Chromebooks and iPads) and interfering devices are doing. It is extremely valuable in diagnosing problems and making changes to the networks. Prime also generates reports on anything from resource utilization to device locations.