Ultra fast WIFI installation at Gregynog Hall

Project Overview

Client: Greynog Hall - The University of Wales

Location: Gregynog Mid Wales

Date: April 2017

Greynog Hall is a superb 16th century manor house in Mid Wales. Owned by the University of Wales and used widely for conferences and events by the public, students and professionals throughout the country. The existing WIFI system was slow, insecure and patchy, with a mixture of manufactures and no central management. The legacy WIFI system was served by 15 access points from Cisco, Level One, Netgear and D-Link. These were a mix of technologies from 802.11g single band to 802.11n dual band, running with no network security and served by one 6 Mbit ADSL internet connection. With no method of limiting network access at peak times the whole system slowed to a crawl.

The Challenge and Solution

Our challenge was to provide a comprehensive WIFI network throughout the building while being sympathetic to the Grade 2 listed structure.

Initially the building was surveyed to test how how many access points would be required to serve the whole building. The final solution involved installing:

18x 802.11ac Dual band Wireless access points
5x Layer 2 managed POE switches
1x On-site hybrid cloud controller
1x Network router
1x 100 Mbit leased line

A key part of the solution involved finding new cable routes through the building without disturbing any of the existing features.

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The new system now features multiple WIFI networks providing different levels of service for, public, private and conference users.

Seamless roaming is now possible throughout the building and for the first time WIFI calling can be used. This is extremely useful as mobile phone coverage is almost non existent in the main building.

A central management console provides full system administration, statistics and user management.

The system can be managed from a tablet, phone or PC either on-site or remotely. Providing complete control of the network from anywhere on any device.