The Situation

Autumn Lodge in Hove care for residents with dementia. They originally had only a single consumer grade internet connection in their office, but were rapidly reaching a point where they would need to expand their network for their own staffing needs, and for their residents, so they got in contact with our Apple Business Support team.

They also wished to provide piped audio & wireless access to every area of the building. We took this opportunity to fully overhaul their network infrastructure, so as to make it easier to expand in the future. 

The Solution

The owners of Autumn Lodge had settled on a connection via Virgin Media Fibre Optic to provide the kind of bandwidth that was required for a site of their size, as BT could not provide a competitive solution in terms of price or performance.

The original BT infinity connection was left in place and using a pfSense router we were able to aggregate both connections to provide over 300Mbps of bandwidth to the site. This also provided a failover connection in the event of a telecoms failure.

We recommended the Ubiquiti UniFi Wireless system, comprised of a 24-port switch, security gateway and a cloud key, for remote system access. This, and the piped audio was installed by an external contractor.

Once installed, we configured the wireless into two partitions, allowing guests to freely connect to the internet without being able to interact with the Autumn Lodge internal network.

The Result

The end result is a network with a solid base that can be easily upgraded or expanded in future. Management of the network can be undertaken remotely, no longer requiring our Apple Support Team’s presence on site, allowing us to fix any problems in a much quicker timeframe.