Always-on connectivity enables true digital learning at St. Albert the Great Catholic School

The Challenge

At St. Albert the Great Catholic School, network connectivity was so unreliable that its teachers had to have two lesson plans for each day: one that assumed Chromebooks could be used and another for no Wi-Fi connection whatsoever. Teachers had to go to specific spots in their classrooms to access service, and at one point, had to go so far as reserving blocks of time to be online. Bottom line: the school’s 300 students were not in an ideal learning environment due to connectivity issues.

• Poor wireless coverage, lack of seamless roaming
• Limited capacity for high-tech learning environment
• Prohibitive cost of external IT contractors
• Frustrating, time-consuming troubleshooting

The Solution

The AI-enabled Nile Access Service was a game changer for St. Albert the Great Catholic School. Highly-resilient, enterprise-class APs provide end-to-end coverage, and high-performance switches support all of the AP and IoT requirements. Campus zero trust isolation secures the entire network to eliminate unauthorized access and malicious actors.

• Full site coverage with seamless roaming
• High-definition Wi-Fi 6 capacity everywhere
• Predictable pay-per-user consumption model
• Resilient self-healing network
• Always-on, campus zero trust network with no operational overhead

The Results

Today, Nile not only provides end-to-end coverage in and among classrooms and all campus facilities, it also has the capacity to seamlessly support the 700 devices that connect to the St. Albert network. Simplified IT operations have given St. Albert IT and teachers the time they needed to focus on education.

• Students receive continuous, uninterrupted instruction, all in a highly-secure environment
• Teachers focused on teaching instead of the network fixes or workarounds
• Collaboration both internally and with community partners increased and improved
• Visitors now have a guest network they can rely on and trust

Leave the network to Nile, teaching to the teachers

Nile took care of the full network service. It was a combination of expert planning, enterprise-grade hardware installation, optimizing cable installs and AI-enabled cloud services that are constantly analyzing and monitoring the performance of the network. Not wanting to impact staff or students, Nile installed the network over the course of a weekend and it was operational on Monday.

Rochelle Perez, who is both a computer technology teacher and IT support for St. Albert, describes the experience. “What I liked about Nile was they were going to take the whole thing over completely and get us up and running. I’ll admit, I was a little nervous turning the entire network over to Nile, but one week in, we were sold. We turned off our original vendor network and completely converted to Nile.”

Thrilled with her high-performing, hands-off Nile Access Service, and confident that St. Albert students are in the best learning environment possible, Perez decided to move the entire organization to Nile.

“I had seen the value of the Nile network at the school and how much time it saved me, so I decided to streamline everything across the campus,” Perez recalls. “We also had additional projects we weren’t able to do with the existing network.”

Before Nile, the church building didn’t have any existing network in place, the parish office had faculty working during the day and events in the gathering room that the network couldn’t support, and the connectivity for the cameras in the child development center was spotty. Perez brought all three sites online with Nile and hasn’t looked back.

High-performing network connectivity, everywhere

“Nile has allowed us to expand in ways we had envisioned but hadn’t been able to because we were held back by our network,” says Perez. “The availability of reliable Wi-Fi in more places is making everything easier.”

Seamless connectivity now allows easy movement among buildings for collaboration, and it’s giving peace of mind that Zoom calls with community partners won’t be dropped. St. Albert can now also support remote work for employees.

“Having Nile as our backbone across the entire campus now is amazing,” says Perez. “I can count on one hand the number of tickets I’ve had in the last two years.”

The “whodunnit” connectivity problem, lack of support

Prior to Nile, frustration over not being able to identify the problem when “the network went down” was running high. It was like trying to find a needle in a haystack to determine if the problem was the network, the ISP or the applications themselves. And the existing network provider failed to identify the source of the problem. This placed a significant strain on teachers who, if they had any technology experience at all, were often called out of their classrooms to help troubleshoot.

Nile’s intuitive Customer Portal changed all of that. The portal provides a complete snapshot of the network and eliminates the troubleshooting guessing game by quickly pinpointing the source of any problems.

Nile support has also dramatically simplified IT management for Perez.

“The support experience with Nile is different from any vendor I’ve ever worked with,” she says. “The difference can be summed up in two words: no excuses. When we come to Nile with a request or an issue, they don’t make excuses, they work until they find a solution and they meet our expectations.”

Protecting Students

Both digital and physical security for students and their data is a top priority at St. Albert and Nile’s campus zero trust isolation supports that by eliminating unauthorized access and malicious actors.

“As the IT administrator, it’s really important for me to know that our kids are protected from things that could sneak onto our network” says Perez. “With Nile, I have peace of mind and a lot less work to do around security.”

“We have everything here at St. Albert streamlined, and now that all of our wired and wireless devices are connected to Nile, our connectivity issues are in the past.”

– Rochelle Perez, Computer Technology Teacher, St. Albert the Great Catholic School

“After our experience with Nile, there’s nobody else that we would go with… They have been that good.”

– Rochelle Perez, Computer Technology Teacher, St. Albert the Great Catholic School