Founded in 1848, Trinity College Camarthen is a church college within the University of Wales, located just outside the town of Carmarthen in the south-west of the principality. The college has 2200 full-time and part-time students, many of whom live on campus in halls of residence during the first year of their programme.

Trinity's students come from all over the UK. There is also a growing community of international students studying at the campus, including Study Abroad students from the USA, and students from other universities in Europe through the EU funded Erasmus programme.

Trinity College seeks to build on its influence as a long established Church-related community university. Its mission is to be a provider of high quality bilingual education and training, that makes an effective contribution to the economic, social and cultural prosperity of Wales.

In 2004 Trinity College began to trial a wireless network restricted to public areas on the university campus. This proved such a success that a decision was made to roll out wireless access to students in their halls of residence. Trinity College believed that the university had to demonstrate duty of care in rolling out this proposed new network. Any student access to inappropriate web content had to be blocked. No comprehensive preventative measures had been implemented by the IT Department previously, as all university computers had so far been limited to public areas - in the university library or other open forum - which had been considered a sufficient deterrent to inappropriate use. Trinity had simply applied a free downloadable web proxy to perform the most basic tasks. The introduction of a wireless network to cover students' private living quarters demanded a new and far-reaching approach, and for the first time the university began to explore the possibility of adopting hardware-based filtering technology as a method of controlling user access to the web on campus - at the same time as blocking malware at the gateway.

Mark Bover, IT Engineer at Trinity College, was recommended Blue Coat Systems' ProxySG 8000 series by a technology partner he had worked with during the course of an earlier project.

'We wanted to maintain a malware-free network as well as ensuring that students could enjoy faster and improved access to those Internet resources that will benefit their learning experience while at the university, and blocking access to undesirable Internet sites. This is what Blue Coat Systems' ProxySG 8000 offered us,' explained Bover.

'The ProxySG 8000 appliance is also easily configured, offering us the facility to simply point and click in order to make the desired settings - a rare quality that places it above rival products in that space. It has enabled us to promote secure, responsible web use in a smooth and trouble-free implementation. What could have been a long and frustrating project was made incredibly simple with the proxy appliance.'

Trinity College is due to introduce a policy requiring students in any hall of residence to sign an agreement acknowledging their responsibilities regarding appropriate web use before access to the new wireless network can be granted.

Bover points out that there had been no legal requirements bearing on Trinity College to enforce Internet use, and that the university itself took the initiative in promoting the responsible use of resources. 'The university has accepted the social responsibility that should naturally come hand-in-hand with providing a facility of this sort. It is purely a self-regulatory action with no external pressure being applied on us to take preventative measures.'

'The rollout was simple,' said Bover. 'We had the hardware in our possession for several months and put the appliances through an in-depth testing process before installation. It took less than a day to install, with another week required to narrow down the configuration in accordance with our own needs. Set-up was self-explanatory and at no point was there the need to return to Blue Coat for assistance. We knew that if any problem did arise, Blue Coat would be on hand for us immediately to resolve the issue.'

Bover explains that the ProxySG can carry out its function without affecting legitimate Internet use. If users attempt to view unauthorised material, a notification will appear on the screen. In all other cases, the user experience will suffer no ill effects from the implementation and students will be able to conduct their research and university coursework unhindered by connection problems or the need to access valuable reference material on the web.

'Overall, the effect of the proxy appliance was to slightly boost web performance, as well as controlling user access for the good and ensuring that the constant worry over malware variants - including spyware - was made a thing of the past.'