Student Accommodation
Stanley House: New Build WiFi at Scale
Fully managed WiFi covering a new build and an upgraded older building.
Client Overview
Background
Stanley House is a purpose-built student accommodation on Talbot Street in central Nottingham, minutes from Nottingham Trent University. The site pairs a period red-brick building, complete with clock tower, with newer construction alongside it. That made the project two jobs in one: WiFi for a brand new building, plus an upgrade to part of the older building so residents on both sides get the same standard of connection.
The network had to be sized for how students actually live now. A single resident typically arrives with a phone, a laptop, a console and a smart TV, so a building like this is really a network of hundreds of devices, most of them busy at the same time in the evening. A system that looks fine on paper falls over at exactly that point.
The two buildings needed different thinking. A new build lets you plan cabling and access point positions before the walls are closed up, which is the cheapest and cleanest time to do it. An older building is the opposite: the structure is fixed, so the network has to be designed around it. The brief was one network, one standard, across both.
How we helped
Solutions
AirGen IT delivered the full end-to-end service across both buildings, including:
- A full site survey of the new build and the older building, mapping how the older structure affects signal and where the new build needed coverage.
- One network design across the two buildings, so every resident gets the same reliable connection whichever side they live on.
- A design sized for modern student device counts, with capacity for the phones, laptops, consoles and TVs that fill a modern student building.
- Complete installation, from cabling and comms cabinets through to access points across both buildings.
- 24/7 proactive monitoring from the day the network went live, so faults are spotted before residents report them.
- Direct tenant support. Residents contact AirGen with any connection issue, not the site team.
Outcome
Result
The internet at Stanley House is stable and fast, and tenant complaints are minimal. Some tenants have commented on the improved speed and reliability, which is the strongest signal there is. Residents rarely praise WiFi unless it has genuinely surprised them.
Both buildings now run as one managed network. AirGen monitors it around the clock and handles resident support directly, so the site team is not fielding WiFi complaints, and a fault in either building gets picked up and fixed the same way.
