2024/2025 Service Definition

School LAN and Wi-Fi Support Service

About the Service

Our School LAN and Wi-Fi Support Service is designed to provide your school or multi-academy trust with reliable, high-performance, and secure local area network (LAN) and Wi-Fi infrastructure. As part of the service, we work with you to design and propose a suitable solution that meets your requirement, taking in to consideration factors such as types of devices connecting, number of devices connecting, building layout, building composition, future projected capacity needs, and level of resilience required.

What are the benefits?

  • Fully cloud managed School LAN and Wi-Fi support service including all the configuration and security, and options to ensure that you are able to meet or exceed the relevant digital and technology standards set by the DfE. Where required, our solution allows hybrid management of your solution, allowing your allocated Curriculum Network technician, or local technician to make simple changes.
  • Our specialist in-house Wi-Fi design engineers conduct thorough Wi-Fi site surveys to ensure optimal coverage, performance, and reliability, resulting in a Wi-Fi solution perfectly tailored to the needs of your school, or multi-academy trust.
  • A solution that perfectly complements your Broadband and Online Services Bundle, ensuring that you can fully benefit from the high bandwidth that is provided by Full Fibre Broadband.
  • A solution that is optimised for your Education Digital Services provided Digital Telephony Service.
  • As part of the ongoing support service, we monitor the equipment, providing security patches, and ensuring that any failed hardware covered by warranty is replaced by the vendor.
  • Your network is a critical underpinning technology. We design to support indoor and outdoor learning needs for today and the future, as schools continually enhance learning through digital technology.
  • New for 2024/25: We provide a cloud managed solution that is perfect for the needs of your school, or multi-academy trust. Our Aruba Instant On solution provides a cost-effective option for smaller schools, while the Aruba Central solution will meet the demands of even the biggest secondary school.
  • The service is managed by an in-house network team at Lancashire County Council, who specialise in supporting LAN and Wi-Fi infrastructure. The team supports solutions that connect tens of thousands of users daily across education and public sector in Lancashire and surrounding areas.

What's Included?

Service Features

Feature Description

LAN & Wi-Fi
  • The design, implementation and on-going annual support for a LAN & Wi-Fi network within your school. The ongoing annual support is provided to you as a managed service.
  • Any new equipment that we provide within our proposal will come as standard with at least five years licensing and either support, or limited lifetime warranty to cover replacement in case of failure.
  • We have selected Aruba as our vendor, delivering the best combination of value and functionality. Any new solution implemented will be based on Aruba hardware, and managed either using Aruba Instant On, or Aruba Central.
  • Option to include battery backup for your comms cabinet in the form of a UPS (uninterrupted power supply).

Cloud Managed

We manage your solution using our preferred vendor’s cloud management platform. This allows us to monitor the availability of the service, undertake remote changes, pro-actively schedule software upgrades, and perform remote troubleshooting.

Network Switching
  • We only provide wired network solutions that will enable a minimum of gigabit (1Gbps) connectivity to the user, which is perfect for ensuring that you are full-fibre broadband ready.
  • Our solutions can be designed to conform the appropriate network switching technology standard defined by DfE.

Network Cabling
  • Our solution includes the costs for cabling works using our preferred suppliers. We will typically re-use existing structured cabling where appropriate and practical to reduce cost and buildings disruption.
  • If we need to provide new cabling, we are able to deliver in conformance with the network cabling technology standard defined by DfE.

Wi-Fi Network
  • Wi-Fi is increasingly critical for schools, and as such we perform detailed Wi-Fi surveys. This is to ensure that we only propose solutions that provide most optimal Wi-Fi coverage across your school.
  • Our Wi-Fi solution is designed using the latest technology, and standards to maximise your return on investment.
  • Our solutions can provide coverage as required both indoors, and outdoors, to ensure that you are not restricted, and can maximise technology within the full learning environment.
  • On request we can create secure and isolated network to support your BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) needs.
  • On request we can create a secure, and isolated visitor Wi-Fi network to which you can control access, for example through sponsored access.
  • Our solutions can be designed to conform to the appropriate wireless switching technology standard recommended by the DfE.