"One of the things we are finding out, and working with our partners with CAE, is how we can leverage the information the platform gives us to better understand the estate that we have. It is the ingenuity of technology partners that enabled us to build the provisioning system, that we were able to provision a network for a secondary school, in a couple of hours." - Simon Billington, ICT & Infrastructure Manager, Wrexham County Borough Council.

A Partnership for the Future

How CAE and Cisco helped Wrexham County Borough Council achieve their digital and sustainability goals 

In the early 2020, Wales underwent a major transformation across its education system, with the government allocating £50 million in funding to not only level up the technology across the education sector but also support a new curriculum that focused on digital skills and creativity. That’s when Wrexham County Borough Council (WCBC) partnered with CAE Technology Services to upgrade their network and Wi-Fi for 70 schools across the County. 

With Cisco Meraki, WCBC achieved a unified view of all networks across the entire school estate, enabling centralised visibility, control, management and programmability. But the journey didn’t end there. As part of the rollout project, we also utilised our Nucleus automation and orchestration solution, which streamlined the network and device provisioning process, leading to quicker service delivery, consistent design consistency and accelerated realisation of investment value. 

Fast forward to the present day, and Wrexham County Borough Council have strengthened their efforts in efficiency and sustainability with CAE and Cisco.  A partnership that involved deploying a Cisco Meraki solution to transform the network infrastructure across all 70 schools that serve over 20,000 students from primary and secondary education. This time, WCBC saw an exceptional win, especially using WiserWatts from CAE, an integrated energy management solution that connects to the Meraki platform. 

With the CAE Labs-powered innovation and Cisco, they managed to cut down overnight Wi-Fi electricity usage by 52%, saving up to £22,000 for fiscal year 2023-2024, as well as an estimated annual reduction of carbon emissions by ten metric tons. CAE also helped to rapidly provision and install Meraki MT10 sensor technology using our Nucleus automation solution, which monitors the temperature and humidity across 160 Comms Rooms, thus offering valuable insight for optimising air conditioning in situations where there is significant overheating or overcooling. 

Watch this video to learn more about how Wrexham County Borough Council transformed their network and schools with CAE and Cisco.