| Customer | Walsall College |
| Location | Walsall, West Midlands |
| Requirement | A new campus that needed cabling, voice and data infrastructure |
| Equipment | Excel Cat5e Cable, Excel Cabinets, Excel Fibre |
| Customer's View | “Seamless migration was our objective on this project and with Amillan we achieved that. Throughout the project we had every confidence that they would deliver what they promised and they did.”
Deb Rajania, Project Director, Walsall College |
Walsall College is the largest provider of qualifications for 14-19 year olds in the Borough of Walsall, typically supporting 3500 young people in accessing vocational courses each year. In addition, Walsall College provides education and training to over 8000 adults, delivered both at the College campuses and onsite in the workplace. They are geared to become a nationally renowned centre for vocational and technical excellence and they are committed to transforming the local economy through industry focused skills and knowledge.
Led by the Walsall Regeneration Company, Walsall town centre and its surrounding areas have been through a revitalisation. As part of this, the College saw a brand new development with the creation of the Wisemore Campus. Now open for learning, the Wisemore Campus offers world class facilities and provides students with an exceptional learning environment.
As part of the development, cutting edge facilities for students and teachers were a necessity, and so installing the right cabling, voice and data infrastructure became vital. The College knew that a seamless migration from the old systems to the new environment was essential, and so they looked for a technology partner who could provide a fully integrated solution, had a proven track record of doing so, and had the vision to provide the College with the technology solutions to take them into the future.
Walsall College chose Amillan to provide their structured cabling, telephony, data and applications for the new campus. Chosen for their ability to provide a full communications infrastructure, Amillan was also able to demonstrate a very strong track record of delivering complex projects with many household names in the UK. With over 25 years’ experience of working with private and public sector organisations, Amillan was a safe pair of hands with the commercial stability, technology expertise and strong project management capability needed to deliver this time critical project.
Commencing in June 2008, Amillan had the advantage of working on the project right from the start, with a clear understanding of all the infrastructure requirements, from cables, switches, handsets and applications. They put together a migration plan to move staff and equipment from the old buildings to the new campus.
ICT is central to the design of the new building, allowing a flexible approach that delivers learning resources wherever students and staff need them. To achieve this, a high performance network infrastructure has been installed throughout to support a wide range of current and future data, voice, video and other intelligent building solutions, such as heating, ventilation and air conditioning, and security systems. To give the network extra resilience, extensive redundancy has also been built into the infrastructure.
Amillan knew that the best products for the cabling infrastructure were Excel products. Excel Category 6 UTP cabling was provided throughout the four storey building with 10 communications rooms and 30 cabinets supporting 6700 outlets, with OM3 fibre and copper backbone connectivity linking the main communication rooms to satellite communication rooms.
Excel Category 6 UTP cable is designed for optimal support of high-speed data protocols delivering 1 Gbps performance to the workstation whilst the OM3 fibre optic backbone cabling system delivers the 10Gbps performance for the resilient data network.
Working with Amillan on the project right from the beginning has given Walsall College a greater level of integration across the campus. Technologies have been deployed for best purpose and having a single provider who could give them simplified communication, integration and mobility has hugely benefited Walsall College.
Having Amillan as the single provider for cabling, voice and data infrastructure eliminated complications on the project at every stage, and a seamless migration was provided.
In addition, having simplified communications integration at the new campus makes it easier for the College to monitor, manage and report on. The associated cost of managing and maintaining the network is also reduced.
With an integrated IP infrastructure in place, Walsall College now has the platform on which to deploy new technologies and applications easily and effectively. As the college moves forward as a leader in the provision of further education, new technologies will be embraced to further enhance the teaching and learning experience to help truly achieve the goal of bringing talent to life.
