Improving Wi-Fi service for a Liverpool City Centre student housing development

09 March 2021

Lansafe Ltd installed  Draytek solutions to improve the WiFi service within a Liverpool city centre student housing development.

The Requirement

• Find a reliable, low-cost Internet connectivity solution for 3 student housing buildings servicing 130+ students

• Improve the bandwidth access to the existing 4 ADSL broadbands  - which were providing slow connectivity (around 15mbps) and segregated across 4 separate routers

• Improve wireless connectivity

• Cover two additional buildings for 100 students with one leased line

• Manage solution remotely

 

The Solution

Lansafe was contracted by a private landlord to provide Internet connectivity, residential Wi-Fi and broadband failover options for three student housing buildings located within Liverpool City Centre.  

The first building housed 37 students, over 7 floors. Lansafe installed a DrayTek Vigor business class, multi-WAN router 

(Vigor 3320) and 2 Vigor switches (VigorSwitch P2280x) to manage primary and backup WAN connectivity to the building. The Vigor router is a quad-WAN load-balancer. The multiple WAN interfaces can be used either for WAN-Backup or Load-Balancing. WAN-Backup provides contingency (redundancy) in case of your primary ADSL line or ISP suffering temporary outage.

To offer robust Wi-Fi connectivity, Lansafe installed 8 VigorAP 912C access points throughout the building.  The VigorAP 912C is a high-performance, ceiling mounted, dual-band access point. It supports up to four distinct SSIDs (for VLANs) for each frequency band within 2.4 and 5Ghz. Multiple channels were used to maximise Wi-Fi performance throughout the building.

The remaining two student housing buildings were located across the street from each other. One building housed 64 students, over 9 floors and the other building housed 35 students, over 6 floors.  

Lansafe installed two Vigor 2862 routers and linked the buildings via a 1Gbps wireless point

 to point - linking the two sites into a primary high speed leased line Internet connection. In addition, each building was outfitted with a 24 port, PoE switch, VigorSwitch P2280x, and multiple VigorAP 912C access points. 

An additional ADSL broadband is linked to the Vigor 2862 router in the 3rd building.  This is used for VigorACS device management and broadband failover.  

VigorACS is DrayTek’s Central Management System (CMS). It supports all current DrayTek routers, switches and access points - providing System Integrators or system administration personnel a real-time integrated monitoring, configuration and management platform. At a glance, Lansafe can see the status and activity of DrayTek devices anywhere on the Internet, as well as receive alerts if a device has gone offline or any other alarm conditions selected.  

“Our brand is all about reliable technology and IT services for small and medium sized business, education and hospitality companies in the North West of England.  Our goal is to install and never receive technical fault complaints,” stated Adam Baxendale, Lansafe Ltd, Sales Director.

“Within this student housing development, we have 100+ students using well in excess of 1TB of data every week – so far, the DrayTek Vigor routers have never needed to be rebooted.

Draytek Solutions reinforce Lansafe brand of being a premier provider of reliable Managed IT & Network technology solutions.”

For more information please contact: UK/IRE Sales Contact: info@draytek.co.uk  |  Main Tel: 0345 5570007  |  Website: www.draytek.co.uk