Updating education facilities to ensure that your new state-of-the-art campus provides leading-edge technology across a small, physical space could be seen by many as a significant challenge.

And it was an issue that Bruce Heil, assistant principal at Edinburgh’s Telford College, was keen to meet head-on, as he attempted to maintain a high level of teaching excellence.

‘We wanted something that would encapsulate our current and predicted requirements, and we were experiencing great demand from both students and commercial customers to use wireless devices,’ he says.

‘Therefore, we saw pervasive wireless as not only being relevant now, but able to address our future needs.’

Telford College was set up in 1968. It employs about 600 staff and provides vocational education to some 18,000 students.

Over the past five years, the organisation has spent £75m on constructing a new site that is due for completion in May this year. The new site is about two-thirds the size of the former campus, which was set across four sites.

Heil says it was crucial that, despite a reduction in geographical space, Telford College could concentrate as much as possible on teaching and learning.

This aim led the college to introduce a wireless converged voice and data network, based on Nortel technology.

The infrastructure will be supported by network services provider Affiniti, during a three-year deal valued at £1m.

The technical goal of the project, according to Mike Turpie, head of learning resources and IT at Telford College, was to move away from a fixed computer lab towards increased flexibility.

The organisation hopes it can enable staff and managers to work in an open-plan environment, helping workers to hot-desk anywhere in the building using wireless-enabled laptops and softphones.

‘We wanted to create a flexible area for students and staff, so whether they are working in the kitchen, a social space or a joinery workshop, they can flip out their wireless-enabled device and access emails, or attach their softphone to the network and make calls or access drives and directories,’ says Turpie.

Telford College’s 250 lecturers will also use wireless-enabled laptops for all their preparation and teaching activities, which will be delivered to students using interactive whiteboards.

The switch from more traditional teaching methods to technology-based learning meant training was seen as a significant enabler for lecturers and other staff members to use the new systems effectively.

Assistant principal Heil says Telford College set up an 18-month programme to help staff get the best out of technology.

‘They have to be trained to use it effectively or else it is a waste of money,’ he says.

At the same time, Heil says that the college invested time and effort clarifying why it was making the technological investment – and why the move was necessary. ‘It takes a lot of time, patience and explanation’, he says.

Security concerns were another significant issue, especially because of the decision to allow guests onto the network. Telford College worked closely with both its vendor and service provider to resolve concerns.

‘I did a wireless project about three years ago, and at that time the price point was very high and the quality very low. But about a year ago, it became apparent that it had developed into a much more robust and mature service,’ says Turpie.

‘There is still a long way to go, but we thought it necessary to put the functionality in place now because we wanted to have a foundation to build on.’

Enterprise mobility: key statistics

Mobile phones boosted UK worker productivity by nearly £9bn in 2004, according to the Centre for Economic and Business Research. The report says 27 per cent of the UK workforce are now mobile, with 69 per cent considering portable devices to be vital to the way they do their jobs.

Forrester Research says financial services companies are surprisingly slow adopters of enterprise mobility technology. Just 39 per cent of finance firms have implemented mobile systems, compared with 47 per cent of utility and telecoms companies. The public sector and healthcare areas, with 62 per cent adoption rate, have the highest adoption rates.

Analyst Gartner reports that user spending on wireless local area network technology will increase at a compound annual growth rate of 12 per cent from 2004 to 2009 to $1.6bn. Wireless switches and controllers will account for 31 per cent of that.

More than 40 per cent of blue-chip companies expect to make wireless email available to their employees within the next 12 months, according to Forrester. Personalised contact and calendar services are also seen as a priority, with 35 per cent of firms expecting to make such services accessible through wireless devices imminently.

By 2008, wireless broadband services will be offered nationwide or regionally in 75 per cent of countries in Europe, North America and Asia, according to analyst Gartner. The analyst also predicts that mobile WiMax (802.16-2005, formerly known as 802.16e) will be the dominant technology used for wireless broadband deployments by 2012.