Elise Goddard is the Director of E-Learning at Mt Albert Grammar School in Auckland. Here she shares her experience working with N4L during MAGS’ recent transition to the Managed Network.
MAGS is very fortunate to have the perfect set up to deliver IT services to our students and staff. Our secondary network upgrade was completed at the end of Term 3 this year and we now have a 500Mbps connection on N4L’s Managed Network.
Prior to joining N4L the plan we had from another provider met our existing needs, but with the implementation of BYOD for Year 9 starting in 2015 we were concerned about the impact an extra 500 student devices would have on our internet speed (currently 300 students bring their own device on a voluntary basis). But now, thanks to N4L we are confident our new connection will serve us well in 2015 and beyond.
Moving to N4L was very straightforward and the whole transition process was carried out in an extremely professional way. Communication from them was excellent and their focus was always to make sure that we had the best outcome possible. They took the time to discuss our deployment thoroughly with us and consulted us at every step.
As part of the transition process they thoroughly tested everything before we were cut over to the network and we were only down for only an hour – I had warned the staff that it could be longer but because of N4L’s excellent planning there were no unforeseen problems.
Since we started using the Managed Network N4L has been monitoring how we are going and there have been no issues, and our internet speed has been fantastic. I have been particularly impressed by their web filtering system too; for me it’s the best one I have seen in the last 10 years. The excellent upload speed is also a very noticeable improvement on that of our previous service. This is going to be especially important for our year 9 students in 2015 who have been asked to bring their own device.
Clearly, I am impressed!
And a short word from Masaki Takeda, N4L Transition Engineer
A few weeks ago, Mt Albert Grammar School (MAGS) became the largest school to connect to the Managed Network so far, with almost 2700 students now using their new N4L connection. As we’d expect with a school of this size their IT infrastructure was fairly complex. As part of the transition we had to take their original web filtering and firewall platforms(which had become increasingly refined over a number of years) and replicate their configuration using N4L’s services. This presented a new challenge for our transition team and we worked closely with the team at MAGS to ensure that their transition was completed seamlessly.