British Forces School in Germany Improves Learning Through 3Com's Secure and Fast Internet Access.

Business/Technology Editors

HEMEL HEMPSTEAD, England--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 4, 2002

- 3Com and 3Complete Provide King's School With Fast Internet

Access And Migration Path To Wireless And Broadband

Schools today are being placed under increasing pressure to provide students with advanced ICT solutions, including extensive Internet access, which is why King's School turned to 3Com. King's School is located on a military base in Germany and was looking to increase the speed and bandwidth available for its Internet connections. As with all educational organisations, security was also a concern for the school as it needed to ensure pupils could not access unsuitable sites.

Authorised 3Com reseller 3Complete advised King's School to implement a solution comprising of 3Com(R) SuperStack(R) 3 Firewall to act as the school's Web filter/firewall and the SuperStack 3 Webcache 1000 to speed up the downloading of Web content. The school had researched various alternative solutions and found 3Com's solutions to be the most suitable for their requirements as well as the best value for money and the simplest to install.

"King's School needed to speed up their Internet connection as well as filter and restrict Internet access for which a Webcache and firewall are ideal," said Andy Coggin, technical director of 3Complete. "More importantly, however, these products allow King's School to make the most of their existing system. The combination of equipment was so well received at King's that other schools immediately wanted the benefits too."

King's School is a British Forces children's school located in northern Germany. The school has approximately 800 students, 80 of which are 6th form students. At present the school network has 130 PCs in various locations around the school site and also eight laptops set up with wireless connections. The school has approximately 890 users on the network, 90 of which are staff.

One of the main advantages to the school is the perceived improvement to Internet response times. Typically, teachers would have visited a particular website and instructed pupils to do the same. With a slow ISDN connection 20 children clicking on 'go' at the same time causes massive delays before the website appears on the screen. With a webcache installed, as the teacher clicks on the website the page is automatically stored on the cache, the children then click on the same site and the pages appear almost instantly as they are transparently provided from the cache. The cache always checks pages to make sure they are up to date and accurate.

The firewall works in conjunction with the cache and not only provides security from external hackers but also provides security and filtering in-house too. For instance, the firewall contains a filter that stops children from connecting to a site of unsuitable nature. The filter is organised in various categories, e.g. alcohol, drug culture, violence and sex. If they try to connect to any of the banned sites the children are warned that the connection is not allowed and their attempt has been logged and an email sent to the Network Administrator. In addition, if children type inappropriate words, swear words or sexual words, a similar message appears and the words are logged. The filter itself is maintained on a daily basis by a company in the US. Thousands of sites are categorised per week.

"3Complete were extremely helpful in advising us on the best equipment to suit our needs. For us, getting the whole system, as well as installation and training from the same company was a real plus," said Andy Cox, head of IT for King's School. "The installation went very smoothly and from start to finish it took less than two days to install, test and configure the equipment, linking it into our existing network. Included within this time was some training for the staff that would be working with the equipment."

The Internet is a major resource for staff and pupils alike, and having a quicker connection has improved both teaching and learning to a great extent, allowing staff to expand their teaching styles and resources. In addition, the new security features allow the school to monitor and restrict access to unsuitable sites and eliminate any concerns about unauthorised access to the Internet. This has given pupils more freedom to use the Internet and staff can be sure that confidential information on the Intranet is inaccessible to unauthorised internal or external users.

Andy Cox highlighted King's School's satisfaction with the performance and practicality it gets from 3Com products: "The Webcache has been invaluable to us by reducing web traffic and therefore speeding up Internet access. We are very delighted with the performance of both the Firewall and Webcache and the lack of user intervention required."

Andy Cox concluded: "We are currently looking towards broadband and the equipment we have fitted will easily accept this without modification. We are also currently in discussion with 3Complete about extending our network capabilities throughout the school via wireless technology."

About 3Com Corporation

3Com is a tier-one provider of innovative, practical and high-value networking products for enterprise customers. 3Com is also a leader in Internet protocol (IP) service platforms and access infrastructure for the network service provider market. For further information, please visit www.3com.com, or the press site www.3com.com/pressbox.

3Com, the 3Com logo and SuperStack are registered trademarks of 3Com Corporation. 3COMPLETE is a trademark of 3Com Corporation and used by Computer Network Systems Limited under license.