Johnson County Schools Chooses Aerohive® and Dell EMC to Unify Campus Wired and Wireless Network Across the District

Aerohive Networks™ (NYSE: HIVE), a Cloud Networking leader, today announced that Johnson County Schools, a public school district located in Paintsville, Kentucky, has selected Aerohive, in partnership with Dell EMC, to provide its new Wi-Fi network.

Prior to Aerohive’s deployment, Johnson County Schools used a legacy controller-based solution, which was unreliable with access points failing at an alarming rate. Since they are a 1:1 Chromebook school, this became a huge challenge for teachers since Chromebooks are reliant on fast and stable Wi-Fi networks, and even five to 10 minutes without Wi-Fi access can be incredibly disruptive to the classroom environment.

A month after purchasing 350 access points, the Johnson County Schools technology staff has already deployed 150 of them. They are using a combination of the Aerohive AP250 and AP550. In areas with heavy congestion, they are leveraging the Dual 5 GHz software defined radio feature of both the AP250 and AP550 to provide more capacity without the introduction of co-channel interference.

“It’s been an invisible installation – each access point is plug and play,” said Mike Whitaker, data communications specialist, Johnson County Schools. “Once it boots up, it grabs the correct configuration from HiveManager, reboots, and then starts providing Wi-Fi for teachers and students. This simple installation process has allowed us to begin installing during the school year instead of waiting for summer break. For an enterprise-grade wireless solution, Aerohive has been incredibly easy to configure and deploy.”

One of the best things that Johnson County Schools saw with the Aerohive deployment was that teachers and students didn’t know anything was happening during the process. The installation process was fast, and it integrated seamlessly into their environment. Teachers across the district have noticed an immediate benefit, as they no longer have to worry about Wi-Fi being unavailable and disrupted during the school day.

Before having Aerohive, Johnson County Schools also ran into problems with their controller, which caused major problems across the entire district. With a distributed control and cloud managed architecture, Aerohive access points do not require a legacy controller to provide Wi-Fi access. In fact, the technology staff at the district could even upgrade its HiveManager software during business hours without impacting wireless access of teachers and students.