Ibstock Place School builds a high‑performance digital learning campus with RUCKUS Networks
London’s Ibstock Place School modernised its campus‑wide wireless connectivity by using RUCKUS® solutions to support their innovative modern learning. This primary and secondary school upgraded its Wi-Fi® during the summer break to deliver seamless, high‑density coverage, simplified network management, as well as a secure and scalable foundation for one‑to‑one learning, esports, and next‑gen digital initiatives.
Industry:
K-12 education
Partner:
inTEC EDUCATION
Products:
RUCKUS wireless access points (APs) RUCKUS ICX® switches RUCKUS One®
Ibstock Place School is an independent, co-educational day school for pupils ages 4 to 18. Since its founding in 1894, it has provided children and parents with a dynamic curriculum that inspires curious thinkers who thirst for knowledge. This institution offers an educational setting driven by a strong family ethos, a diverse range of opportunities and a friendly, supportive atmosphere.
One of its core principles is offering students and faculty a modern-day Wi-Fi network where they can learn, explore and grow together. Unfortunately, as the school acquired newer educational technology, the existing wireless network would stall, buffer or quit. By working with inTEC EDUCATION, Ibstock Place was able to revamp their network to support all existing ed tech while providing room to grow as other technologies come along, including Wi-Fi 7.
The Challenge: Growing bandwidth and low‑latency demands
As digital curriculum and ed tech tools become more sophisticated, the existing campus network struggled to keep pace with the demands for increased speed and bandwidth. In addition, to grow their esports programme, they required stable, yet robust, low- latency connectivity. Throughout the years, Ibstock Place School invested heavily in digital learning tools throughout their campus. But with each new piece of ed tech, their ageing network struggled to support the technology. When their computer classrooms accessed the network at the same time, the network was often overloaded and affected other areas of the school campus—creating inconsistent connectivity and impacting learning.
Plus, as the school built out their new Innovation Centre and expanded its esports programme—across a large campus mixing old buildings with modern facilities—connectivity concerns emerged. This private school needed to build a network that’s reliable and fast and that allows the pupils to play unimpeded in their online gaming competitions.
The Solution: Future‑ready network transformation
inTEC EDUCATION deployed a network upgrade using RUCKUS solutions that resolved all coverage and capacity issues while creating a network that’s future-ready for the next generation of school tech solutions and devices. Ibstock Place School decided to partner with inTEC EDUCATION for a number of reasons. Not only did they have 20 years’ experience deploying large networks in independent schools, but they could provide everything the school needed—from design and deployment to ongoing support after the installation.
The school was also impressed with the RUCKUS portfolio of solutions available that are specifically designed for high-capacity, high-density environments like a K-12 education campus. With RUCKUS One—a cloud-based, AI-driven network management platform—they could easily monitor and manage the network from a simple, customizable dashboard without needing to run anything on their servers.
To improve the network’s speed and capacity, inTEC deployed RUCKUS ICX 7550 switches at the core and ICX 7150 switches at the edge. To provide total coverage throughout the campus, even in the older brick buildings that are notorious for attenuating signals, inTEC installed RUCKUS R650 Indoor APs.
“Connectivity runs to the heart of what we’re doing as a school. We need it to be fast, we need it to be reliable—and, of course, safety really matters. With RUCKUS, we now have excellent connectivity so pupils can enjoy a truly modern education.”
Ibstock Place School Leadership Team
The Results: Faster, reliable, campus‑wide connectivity
Following the deployment of RUCKUS solutions, the Ibstock Place School wireless network became faster, more reliable, and ubiquitous across the entire campus, as well as easier to monitor and manage. Additions or changes to the network were now quick to implement and potential obstacles were resolved before they became an issue. After deploying dual RUCKUS core switches, Ibstock Place School saw a 10-fold improvement in speed (100 Gbps) via a central backbone, and 2x 10 Gbps to every edge cabinet location. These multi-gigabit network switches delivered more capacity and stability to the network, and they enabled the switching performance to meet the demands from end-user devices as well as the development of esports. This allowed the school to roll out of one-to-one student devices (Year 7–13) and hybrid learning—“completely transforming the way we teach.”
The new ICX switches also supported the high-performance RUCKUS APs that used the patented BeamFlex+® adaptive antenna technology to help mitigate interference and extend coverage from historic buildings to modern labs. The school Wi-Fi now offers extended coverage throughout the entire eight-acre campus with no dead zones or places with dropped connections.
The RUCKUS One management platform helped boost client throughput by 15-40%, minimize packet loss in transmissions by 25-60%, and reduce the average latency by 20-50%. Due to the AI presence, troubleshooting time (mean time to resolution) dropped by 50-80%. The school also experienced fewer misconfiguration errors and was able to detect, identify and mitigate rogue or unauthorized devices in real time.
Ibstock Place School plans to remain a tech-forward school by continuing their innovation agenda and adopting next-generation wireless technologies using RUCKUS as their long-term infrastructure partner.
FAQs
The legacy wireless network wasn’t able to support the new ed tech and end-user devices without slowing down, dropping connections or simply crashing. Coverage outside the tech classrooms was poor or non-existent.
We liked that RUCKUS had experience in the educational sector and innovative technology that can support the high-density, high-performance network that we wanted. The AI-driven RUCKUS One dashboards made managing the network easy and helped us optimize the network for how we wanted it to work.
Once the installation was complete, the entire campus was connected. No more signal interference from our older buildings. Plus, the faster speeds and reliability allowed more pupils to better compete in our esports programme.
The ICX switches brought blazing-fast speeds to our campus that we had never seen before. The BeamFlex® and ChannelFly® technology in the RUCKUS APs provided complete coverage throughout the school with no cross-channel interference. And the cloud-based RUCKUS One was a game-changer for us in terms of ease of use and constantly improving the network performance.
The students, faculty and staff have seen a radical increase in network speed, reliability and overall performance. The upgraded network also boosted our network bandwidth and capacity while respecting our budget limitations. The new system using RUCKUS solutions enhanced our security and cyber compliance with state-of-the-art WPA3 encryption and an active threat-monitoring AI.
