The New Zealand “School District”

Matt Hall

In 2020 the Ministry of Education New Zealand begun their centralised education network deployment which would cover all 2500 public K12 schools in New Zealand. Now half way through this 5 year deployment with 15,000 AP’s deployed join me as I present the logistics of this 30,000 AP deployment.

During my presentation I will discuss some of the unique challenges encountered by a K12 project of this scale including:

• Wi-Fi Planning and Design – Each school has individual requirements but must conform to the budget and overall design rules of the project.

• Streamlining the deployment process of Wi-Fi Access Points and Network switches with network automation and a centralized control platform.

• Network Authentication and Security – PSK / 802.1x and MAC auth all have their role to play when utilizing a centralized authentication solution across 2500 schools. The network edge is required to integrate with network firewalls at each school supporting the assignment of content filtering policy per user.

• Digital Assessment – The New Zealand Ministry has now begun digital exam assessments which require large quantities of students to gather in a single location for this supervised online examination.