Northern Ireland’s largest higher and further education college is deploying a unified wireless network to allow staff and students to remotely access resources.

The Belfast Institute will also use the network to support the tracking of expensive equipment using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology.

Active WiFi tags will be attached to expensive equipment to detect any attempted theft, all of which can be centrally monitored by the institute.

The wireless network is an extension of the institute’s wired network and will allow staff and students to securely access online learning resources, including online class discussions, from laptops and mobile devices.

Added wireless security technology is designed to ensure that any device that attempts to connect to the network adheres to the institute’s security policies prior to access.

A secure wireless network is particularly important at the start of the academic year, as new students access facilities with laptops that have not connected to the network before, says the college’s head of department of learning and teaching resources Alan Dummigan.

‘We chose Cisco to work with us in developing e-learning because it provides vital education facilities faster, easier and on a flexible basis for all students,’ he said.

'The challenge of providing such flexibility and openness to students presents us with a big problem - thousands of people accessing our network with computers over which we have little or no control.’

But Cisco’s network security capability ensures it can deliver both greater accessibility and greater protection, he says.