Webster County will have greater control over its guest network, among other things, with upgrades to its Wi-Fi system, according to Andy McGill, the county’s IT director.

The Webster County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday reviewed and placed on file the IP Pathway quote for $12,132.06 for 26 MR33 and four MR42 access points to replace the current Wi-Fi that is throughout the county buildings. Supervisors also approved the IP Pathways quote for the amount of $9,360 for Statement of Work to upgrade the software for vSphere and NetAPP ONTAP.

“We are wanting to go with a more robust system,” McGill said. “In areas less populated, in the offices, we are going to go with the MR33, which is the bulk of what we have. The MR42 is more high density. We’ll get two over to the bank building and one outside this door here.”

McGill said the county has more than 30 access points throughout all of its buildings.

The new system is a cloud-based utility, McGill said.

“I don’t have to be here on site to see what’s going on,” McGill said. “I can look at it through a cloud-based utility. I’ve been testing one that we had for a while. It worked really well.”

He added, “I like the guest version of it. We can lock it down, so they have no access to our network whatsoever. We can lock down bandwidth. We can see who is on it, who’s not on it. It’s a much better product than what we currently have. It works for us for the ones who are on the secure site. The guest site has been really iffy for us and we really want to shore that up. The units we have now are six or seven years old, starting to fail us.”

McGill said the upgrades didn’t have anything to do with the city’s pursuit of a separate broadband utility.

“This is just the Wi-Fi we have in our buildings here,” McGill said. “We got a really good deal on these units. They are a Cisco-based company. They are more high end.”

In other business, the board added Cargill to its Urban Renewal Area.

According to Mark Campbell, chairman of the board, the county will be reimbursing Cargill over the next five years for future expansion.

The Urban Renewal Area is anything that the county can collect tax increment financing on.