Primary (K-12) Education

If this topic is somewhere else, I apologize.  I didn't find anything when I looked.

I have  been tasked with finding out information regarding placing wifi on buses for our district.  The purpose would be to use them as hotspots in underserved areas of the district in case of a larger scale shutdown.  Aside from the more obvious purchase options like Kajeet, Commscope, Etc.  I have been thinking about using some of the IAP-215s and 214's that I have on site already.  Has anyone attempted anything like this?  Is there a thread about it somewhere?  We have at least some of these IAPs and we also have some Celular Hotspots we bought.  Seems like we should be able to make something work right?

Any thoughts are appreciated. 

Hi there! I saw your post, and was hoping someone would reply. I am a K12 Inside Sales Rep here at Aruba and know that there have been a number of districts that have done what you want to do. I can connect you with one of our Solutions Engineers if you would like. 

Meanwhile here is a quote from one of our folks in California:

"The answer is yes, it is possible and we did in with the City of Sacramento and we are replicating that with Twin Rivers School District. In most cases we used outdoor Aps for that, put the premises are valid for the IAP-215 as well. There are a few possibilities in terms of the internet uplink on the Bus, but the most basic option would be attaching a compatible LTE USB modem on the IAP’s USB port and using that as your regular internet connection. In the projects we worked on we usually had an external device acting as the internet router (it could be our SD-Branch gateways or something like a Cradlepoint router)."

I hope this helps! Let me know if I can connect you with someone one on one!