With 540,000 students, 42,000 teachers, more than 200,000 computers, and 40,000 notebooks spread across the 1700 sites, the department last year allocated A$6.5 million (US$4.8 million) to implement a wireless network aimed at easing connectivity, but at first its technology options were limited.

During a presentation at this year's wireless summit in Sydney today, the department's head of ICT security, Loris Meadows spoke of how the Wireless Networks in Schools (WINS) project required a custom proxy and security services appliance dubbed "EduPass" to be engineered due to the WAN's complexity.

"At the heart of the systems is EduPass. We had an aging fleet of proxy servers and needed to roll out 1700 of them so we saw a good opportunity to add proxy to radius," Meadows said. "We looked at best of breed open source solutions like Smoothwall, Freeraduis, and Openssl; we have our own kernel based on Red Hat Linux and did a lot of development."

After a tender process, Cisco was chosen as the access point vendor in a deal that nearly fell through, Meadows said, because the "networking giant" was reluctant to accept the DET's advice and changes.

"We had a real battle and eventually got Cisco to change its default factory settings," Meadows said. "The access points shipped from the factory with 802.1x authentication and 1024-bit encryption, and it cannot be set back to default."