Case Study: St Mary Star of the Sea College achieves increased network capacity and improved campus security with Cisco Meraki

Meraki channel optimisation tools help achieve more capacity as population grows

St Mary Star of the Sea College, an all‑girls K–12 school in Wollongong serving about 1,100 students and roughly 130 staff, struggled with exploding wireless demand, mixed‑vendor access points, limited visibility and slow, manual device configuration that made adding capacity and troubleshooting nearly impossible. To address these challenges they evaluated and selected Cisco Meraki (MR wireless, MS switching and MV cameras) for a centrally managed, cloud‑based networking solution.

Cisco Meraki implemented an initial rollout of MR access points (55, then another 55 to provide classroom coverage), 14 MS switches and 10 MV cameras (two installed outdoors monitoring campus gates). Using the Meraki dashboard and channel‑optimization tools the IT team achieved faster provisioning and remote remediation, improved capacity (fixing APs that had 200+ concurrent users), application bandwidth controls (e.g., limiting HD YouTube to preserve throughput), device triangulation to locate missing devices, and quick access to security footage (used to review a gate collision). The deployment delivered measurable operational and security gains at roughly half the cost of alternatives while supporting the school’s growing population.

St Mary Star of the Sea College

Martin Janiszewski

IT Manager