Just days before 40 international cadets arrived at Thetford Cadet Training Centre (CTC) for Exercise Baltic Guard, RFCA IT Officers at East Anglia RFCA completed the upgrade of the wifi system at the site, to provide an improved cadet experience.
All the adults and cadets taking part in the 12-day camp at Thetford CTC made full use of the improved wifi coverage. IT Officer David Baker said:”Very quickly, we realised we needed to turn it off overnight, otherwise none of the cadets would have had any sleep!” Although the wifi range extenders were intentionally placed out of range of the sleeping quarters, the visitors were experiencing a strong signal in most other areas of the vast site.
All office areas, classrooms and dining areas benefitted from the improved signal strength, so accessing online content for training and leisure was a fast and seamless experience. Thetford CTC is a large single storey building of solid brick construction; regular site users can also now move freely around the site with a strong wifi signal for their laptops and mobile devices. Staff, cadets and external guests/contractors connectivity and usage are managed separately through wifi groups set up by the IT team.
The existing modem and broadband connection bandwidth remained unchanged, as they were already to a good standard but the wifi range didn’t previously extend into all those areas. The system, which comes with hardware and an online interface for setup and monitoring, was endorsed by Council of RFCA’s commercial team, and proved to be excellent value. The East Anglia RFCA IT team worked tirelessly and quickly to roll out the same system at the Bassingbourn CTC too, just in time for Cambridgeshire ACF to successfully hold their annual camp for hundreds of cadets this summer.
Chris Jewell is the RFCA Cadet Administration Assistant providing logistics support at Thetford Cadet Training Centre. He said: “The new system has worked well since it was installed. It proved really useful straight away.”
East Anglia RFCA’s IT team has a rolling plan to improve connectivity at our sites; the Dereham Cadet Training Centre will soon benefit from extended wifi coverage.