Case studies · Network Infrastructure
Education
network points across an eight-floor campus
classrooms and special rooms with fibre to the room
whole build inside the summer window
logical networks — management, data, phone, WiFi, PA
This was a school standing up from zero — and the whole build had to live inside one summer: roughly four weeks between terms to deliver the physical plant, the switching, the wireless, the firewall and every endpoint position, so the network was ready the day the first class walked in. The design also had to serve five logically separate networks — management, data, IP telephony, wireless, and public-address — over one physical plant, with every access switch individually fibre-linked back to the core so no single uplink became a shared failure point. Classrooms needed fibre-to-the-room with in-room switching, while offices and computer rooms were better served by conventional Cat6 runs. And because a school network carries children's internet access, the firewall was not a bolt-on: content filtering and per-user-group access control had to be engineered into the design from the first diagram, alongside third-party systems — IP cameras, PA speakers, phones — whose vendors answered to the school, not to us.
The one-month window set the sequence, not the equipment list: containment and fibre backbone first, then the rack positions, then access switching and the Cat6 endpoint rush — everything commissioned, labelled and tested against a common cable-identification scheme, so the school can live with the plant long after handover.
The backbone was built as point-to-point single-mode fibre: a dedicated fibre link from every access switch back to the core in the 2/F server room, reaching all eight floors, sized at 10G per uplink with headroom for later growth. Round bend-insensitive OS2 cable in LSZH fire-retardant sheathing, terminated at optical distribution points per floor. Switching runs on the Ruijie campus platform — copper and twin fibre cores with modular redundant supplies, PoE-fed access and in-room switches throughout — managed from Ruijie Cloud.
Fibre-to-the-classroom for every classroom and special room — 60 in-room 10G PoE ONUs carrying fibre in and Cat6 out to each desk, whiteboard, camera and speaker, on 132 single-mode transceiver links end to end — while offices, the staff room and computer rooms took direct Cat6 structured cabling: 354 new runs, with sound existing cabling tested and reused rather than replaced, for a campus of 430 network points.
Network services were separated by design: VLANs for equipment management, general data, IP phones, WiFi and the IP PA system, so a lesson-streaming fault cannot darken the office network and camera traffic cannot reach teaching systems. Ruijie Cloud management was configured with the administration account in the school's own name — the school holds its network, not the vendor or the contractor.
A Sangfor NGFW (NSF-3100A-I) sized well above the school's broadband (30Gbps-class throughput, redundant power) was integrated with the wired and wireless design from the start: application control, URL filtering and content inspection applied per user group, so students, staff and guests each get the internet they are supposed to.
Delivery was contractual end to end: user acceptance testing with as-built drawings, configuration records and commissioning reports, three-year hardware warranty with advance replacement, and a six-month defects-liability support runway — unlimited remote support plus an on-site engineer-hour allowance — with coordination against the camera, PA and telephony suppliers included in scope.
The school opened with its network already finished: 430 points live across eight floors, fibre to every classroom, the campus segmented into five logical networks behind a Sangfor NGFW, and every device cloud-manageable from an account the school owns. The build landed inside the summer window, with the acceptance documentation — as-builts, configuration records, test results — issued with it, and the six-month support runway carried the school into its first term.
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