Orro upgrades Brisbane Catholic schools’ network with faster speeds

Leigh Williams (Brisbane Catholic Education)

Orro has wrapped up a network upgrade for Brisbane Catholic Education (BCE), upgrading it from an MPLS WAN solution to dual fibre services on the National Broadband Network (NBN).

Specifically, the new network uses Enterprise Ethernet and fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP), which Orro claims has increased the resiliency of the network, as well as SD-WAN technology to aggregate higher and lower grade NBN links and direct internet connectivity.

The network upgrade took 18 months to provide 146 Catholic schools and offices – covering over 76,000 students and 12,500 staff – within the Archdiocese of Brisbane with faster speeds.

Additionally, the network upgrade includes cyber security solutions from Fortinet, which contains granular content filtering and edge network security requirements, as well as managed services which Orro will provide over the next five years.

The upgraded network also incorporates advanced cyber security solutions from Fortinet, delivering granular content filtering and edge network security requirements.

As a result of the new network, Orro claims the schools within the Archdiocese will see connection speeds increase by over 400 per cent up to 1.7 Mbps per student.

“We are now in the top tier nationally when it comes to available bandwidth per student,” claimed BCE’s head of IT Leigh Williams.

David Cox, Orro director of business development, added that the new network has “future-proofed” BCE’s schools and rolled it out at the same time as its work for Catholic Education Western Australia.

That project, which was announced back in August, also included the replacement of an existing MPLS WAN solution, dual NBN fibre services and a five-year managed services contract.

Meanwhile, in August, BCE upgraded its enterprise resource planning system across 177 entities with help from Empired.