Ahh, university days. Fun, social times where we made happy memories that linger with us through the rest of our lives. Memories of hours and hours of downtime, followed by furious last-minute cramming for exams.
One thing that could really throw a dampener on those carefree student days was a slow, unreliable internet connection. Not only can it completely ambush the late-night studying and exam preparation, but laggy internet sucks all the fun out of online gaming!
This is the problem Varsity Apartments on the Sunshine Coast were facing when they got in touch with Smile IT. An outdated Wi-Fi system was hampering their ability to study to their full potential, and downtime was taken up with buffering battles rather than Call of Duty battles!
Let’s take a look at who Varsity Apartments are and how Smile IT went about assisting them.
Purpose-Built Student Accommodation
Located around the corner from the University of the Sunshine Coast, Varsity Apartments provide accommodation purpose-built for the student lifestyle. We’re talking neat and comfy four-bedroom private apartments that altogether house around 500 students. (That’s a lot of bandwidth required!)
A member of the Student Accommodation Association for student accommodation providers, Varsity Apartments likes to maintain a certain standard. Their management is committed to providing comfortable, social and secure accommodation to their students – providing an exceptional backdrop to the memories we mentioned above. Good internet is essential for them to be able to do this.
The Problems Faced
Given their commitment to high standards, the outdated Wi-Fi was slowly becoming a headache for the management team. The infrastructure, while being top-notch 15 years ago, was now outdated and unreliable. In addition, accessing the internet wasn’t straightforward for the students. They were required to either bring their own router or purchase one from the admin department, and even then were limited to 100Gb usage per month.
It’s a system that couldn’t support the data-heavy internet users who need a fast and reliable network to facilitate their studies. So, Varsity Apartments got in touch with Smile IT to help them with upgrading their complex Wi-Fi system.
Here’s how we did it.
Wi-Fi Upgrade – Behind the Scenes
We met with the apartment complex management team and proposed rolling out Wi-Fi across the management’s apartments. This would simplify internet access for the students, who could enjoy much faster downloads and uploads once they were connected.
The procedure involved installing Wi-Fi access points in 99 apartments, catering to management’s 396 rooms. We replaced all routing and networking gear across the entire site and were able to give the network cabinets a decent tidy up too.
We were particularly excited, through our SmileTel business communications arm, to be able to provisionally equip the premises with NBN Enterprise Ethernet. This offers high-performance premium internet with speeds of up to 1GB through the NBN – now that’s blisteringly fast! The 1GB EE hasn’t been rolled out just yet, so in the meantime we implemented a bonding service using a mix of the NBN and 5G to provide high-capacity internet. This will carry them through until the EE rollout.
From Lag to Brag – Here are the Results!
Thanks to the successful implementation of the new high-speed internet services at Varsity Apartments, the students’ online experience has been transformed! The network can be relied upon to support them all through the semester, which is particularly handy at busy exam times. The low latency will make their online gaming experience responsive and enjoyable. The Wi-Fi speeds reaching over 300Mbps make researching an assignment straightforward, and the students will enjoy unlimited bandwidth usage for studying and entertainment.
Let’s quantify the results in easy-to-understand Netflix-terms – the previous Wi-Fi system could only support 10 HD Netflix streams at a time. The new system can service 200 of them! That’s a 20-fold increase, which will increase further once the 1GB NBN EE is rolled out.
Get in Touch to Break Your Bandwidth Barriers
There’s no need to put up with frustrating internet speeds or access at your apartment complex or business site. Get in touch with Smile IT and we’ll get you into the fast lane, just like we did for Varsity Apartments. Click here and talk to one of our team members about it today!
When he’s not writing tech articles or turning IT startups into established and consistent managed service providers, Peter Drummond can be found kitesurfing on the Gold Coast or hanging out with his family!