Wi-Fi 6 Network Upgrade

A group of Greater Manchester primary and secondary schools approached Foresight following persistent complaints from teaching staff about unreliable wireless connectivity across all sites. Ageing Wi-Fi 4 (802.11n) and Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) access points, many installed over a decade ago, were struggling to cope with a dramatically increased device count — Chromebooks, iPads, teacher laptops, interactive flat-panel displays and students' personal devices all competing for bandwidth. Dropped connections, slow content loading and dead spots in classrooms were directly impacting the quality of lessons.

The schools needed a solution that would handle high device density (30+ devices per classroom), support the bandwidth demands of modern educational applications and video streaming, integrate with existing network switching infrastructure where possible, and be deployed without disrupting the school day. Budget constraints typical of the education sector meant the design needed to deliver maximum coverage and performance per access point, minimising the total number of units required.

Foresight conducted a full wireless site survey across all school buildings — using heat-mapping software to identify coverage gaps, interference sources and areas of high device density. We designed a Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) access point deployment plan optimised for each building's layout, specifying enterprise-grade hardware with WPA3 security, traffic segmentation across SSIDs for staff, students and IoT devices, and integration with the schools' existing core switching infrastructure. Access points were installed during an INSET day and weekend to avoid classroom disruption, with full testing and sign-off completed before pupils returned.