About Claremont High School Academy

Claremont High School Academy is a multi-specialist school which specialises in Performing Arts, Maths & Computing and Applied Learning. Based in Harrow, Greater London, the school has over 1,500 students and offers a breadth of learning opportunities. Rated 'outstanding' by Ofsted, it strives to ensure that students follow a personalised curriculum in a safe and secure, yet educationally challenging environment.

Solution 

After an in-depth solution assessment which was presented to the school's board, Exponential-e was selected to provide Claremont High School Academy with a scalable high-speed Internet service. Selection criteria included: company reputation and delivery framework, education sector experience, technology solution, cost-effectiveness and service levels.

Daniel Kirby commented: "The quality of the service has been excellent. The Connectivity is reliable and robust and we always get good response rates on the ping. The support and ongoing communications has been better than any other company that we deal with."

Exponential-e worked closely with Claremont High School Academy to ensure the new Internet service was delivered timely to coincide with the school holidays. The school's new service is delivered over an uncontended 100Mbps fibre-optic Connection with the same high-speed uploads as downloads - ensuring staff and students can quickly access and upload coursework from home. In addition, with Exponential-e's own Network integrated with the world's major content delivery Networks, such as BBC and YouTube, educational video content is only one hop away and can easily be streamed in classes without delays.

After successfully deploying the new Internet connection, Exponential-e was also approached to deliver a secure, automated Online Backup Service for the school's mission critical servers. The backup data is carried over the Internet connection via private peering to secure storage in Tier 3 UK-based Data Centres.

"Exponential-e went above and beyond all the other companies. They weren't just trying to make a sale; they're very passionate about what they do. When they invited us to come and see their Network Operations Centre and meet its employees, as well as offered to put us in contact with other schools using Exponential-e services, we knew it was the right company for us. We always receive regular phone calls from them asking how we're getting on. We just don't get that level of attention from any of our other suppliers."

 Challenges

With a growing student population and a newly installed virtual learning platform, Claremont High School Academy's bandwidth was no longer sufficient for the school's needs. The school regularly peaked in its data usage with even basic server administration tasks such as offsite backups taking a considerable time to complete. Since the school's new virtual learning platform was hosted on site, uploading and downloading coursework remotely over the Internet was a slow process. This made it inconvenient for staff and students to access the platform from home and hampered the schools ability to provide an outstanding learning experience.

Daniel Kirby, Network Manager at Claremont High School Academy commented: "We'd hit our limit in terms of bandwidth and it was really affecting our staff and students since accessing coursework could be incredibly slow. We needed to increase our bandwidth substantially and we also needed a more scalable and reliable solution."

The school was also promoting the use of educational video content from YouTube and BBC iPlayer within their classes.

However, with existing bandwidth not being sufficient, streaming video content over the Internet posed real challenges and often wasted valuable teaching time.

As a result, the school recognised the need for a change and approached a number of providers to find a more suitable Internet service capable of supporting the new technologies which are required to deliver a 21st century educational experience. Any new solution would need to be robust, reliable, scalable and cost-effective.

Features 

• Increased bandwidth capacity and performance.
• Savings on infrastructure costs by delivering multiple services over the same connection.
• Improved virtual learning experience with symmetrical upload and download speeds.

About The Barbican Centre

The Barbican Centre (The Barbican) is one of the world's leading arts centres, founded and run by the City of London Corporation. It encompasses dance, film, music, theatre, visual arts and creative learning who work together in creating the model of tomorrow's international arts and learning centre.

The architecturally renowned Centre, now Grade II listed, opened in 1982 and comprises the 1,949 seat Barbican Hall, the 1,166-seat Barbican Theatre, the Pit theatre, a 286 seat cinema, the Barbican Art Gallery, a second gallery The Curve, foyers and public spaces, a library, Lakeside Terrace, roof-top tropical conservatory, conference facilities and three restaurants.

Solution 

After comparing a number of solution providers rigorously, Exponential-e was chosen to deploy a 100Mbps fibre Internet connection. The deciding factors were Exponential-e's professional and responsive approach in designing a solution, its expertise in fibre-based network solutions and experience in the Leisure and Hospitality sector.

Exponential-e provided The Barbican with a significant increase in bandwidth. The additional bandwidth immediately addressed usability issues experienced by Internet users. The extra capacity also provided The Barbican with the scalability needed to create a dedicated WiFi zone for visitors.

The Internet connection provided by Exponential-e enabled The Barbican to deliver multiple services over one connection by splitting VLANs. This meant The Barbican could set and change the bandwidth dedicated to specific services with a few simple keystrokes. This additional flexibility meant that key services such as WiFi or booking services no longer compete for bandwidth. The simplicity in making changes to this service also means that The Barbican is able to provide corporate clients with their own dedicated Internet access to support their events.

 Challenges

The Barbican was looking to maintain its position as a world-class venue in a very competitive marketplace. In order to broaden its appeal to corporate clients, The Barbican implemented a £14.1m refurbishment of its conference facilities.

In line with these improvements, The Barbican decided to upgrade its existing 2Mbps copper-based Internet connection, which was being used to capacity. This was having an adverse effect on the speed of web-based services. Applications such as ticketing systems, internal e-mail and WiFi services slowed down as they competed for bandwidth. The Barbican's existing 2Mbps connection also meant there was limited bandwidth capacity to support the growing demand for Internet access at corporate events, conferences and seminars held at The Barbican.

The Barbican decided to upgrade from its copper-based Internet service to a 100Mbps fibre-based Internet connection. A robust failover option would also be installed to provide additional resiliency for Internet services. The additional bandwidth would allow The Barbican to address the immediate issue of slow speeds suffered by Internet users, provide Internet access to corporate clients in keeping with The Barbican's world-class reputation and improve the resiliency of Internet services.

In addition, the project team faced the challenge of adopting a new set of IP addresses. A knock-on effect of this would be the need to re-configure firewalls and make network address translation (NAT) changes. The project team would have to undertake an overnight migration to minimise disruption to visitor services during business hours.

Exponential-e impressed us with its professionalism and know-how in designing a solution to meet our needs. The solution was more cost-effective than the alternatives and was delivered by an expert project team.

Dominic Smith The Barbican.

About ICA

The International Cotton Association (ICA) is the world's leading international cotton trade association and arbitral body. It carries 170 years of history and a clear mission for the future to protect the legitimate interests of all those involved in the cotton trade.

Established in 1841, the ICA provides a worldwide service for the international sale, purchase and movement of raw cotton between producers, traders and consumers. The majority of the world's raw cotton is traded under ICA Bylaws & Rules and the ICA has more than 500 members, including some of the world's major cotton companies and affiliate industry firms. The organisation operates on a not-for-profit basis.

Solution 

After comparing a number of solution providers rigorously, Exponential-e was selected. Key selection criteria included: technology, customer service, reputation, expertise and price.

Robert Jiang explained: "With the challenges we had faced, we really needed a supplier who could deliver great infrastructure and customer service. The face-to-face meeting with Exponential-e's technical team at its London Network Operations Centre assured us that it was able to deliver the whole package; reliable high-speed Internet connectivity, coupled with great customer service and expertise. And after speaking to a number of other organisations who all recommended Exponential-e's services we were confident that they would be the right choice for us."

Working closely with the ICA, Exponential-e ensured the new Internet connection was deployed timely to coincide with the Association's Liverpool office move.

The Association's new protocol-agnostic connection, delivered over an uncontended 100Mbps fibre-optic connection, easily accommodates for any additional large applications or changes in network bandwidth demand. Since deployment, the ICA has enjoyed a 100% uptime of its Internet connection.

In addition, employees can now easily access emails and company files remotely and backup is effortlessly carried out online. Jiang summarises his experience of Exponential-e: "Unlike some companies where you never speak to the same person and you are passed from one department to another; Exponential-e's approach is very personal, straightforward and proactive. We're always kept up-to-date and that's very reassuring as a customer."

 Challenges

After facing Internet downtime, regular data peaks and with worldwide members relying on the ICA for fast and efficient resolutions to arbitration disputes, the ICA's legacy Internet connectivity was no longer suitable. The Internet downtime resulted in members not being able to to access the ICA website for vital information and the association was unable to communicate with members via email or audio conferencing.

Robert Jiang, Business Operations & Development Manager at the ICA explains: "Our main duty is to provide a good service to our worldwide members. So we have to ensure that we can be contacted at all times. And with strict response timelines for all arbitration cases, it's paramount that all communication is timely – whether that's via email or audio conferencing. With the Internet downtime we experienced, we simply were not able to offer the best quality service to our members. We needed a much more reliable and scalable solution."

Since the association often peaked in its bandwidth usage, even simple administration tasks such as backup proved to be difficult. In addition, accessing the company network remotely was a real challenge for staff. As a result, ICA began sourcing a more reliable solution provider which could offer the infrastructure and customer service levels needed to enable it to provide a better service to its member base.

"A great advantage of Exponential-e's Internet service is that it's Layer 2, which means we can split our connection between multiple services in the future. This will help us to further reduce costs, streamline operations and provide a better service to our members - and this is key for us." - Robert Jiang - Business Operations & Development Manager.

Features 

• Increased bandwidth capacity and performance.
• Reduced overheads with the introduction of audio conferencing over the Internet.
• The ability to converge multiple services over one connection and further reduce costs.