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Neumann University

Ruckus Provides Champion-Caliber Wired and Wireless Network

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It’s the beginning of a new school year. Students return to the Neumann University campus, bringing their ever-expanding array of mobile devices—along with high expectations for being online anytime. The students moving into the four residence halls, or dorms, are the heaviest users of the wireless network. They eagerly log onto the campus Wi-Fi network to start using the Internet. But the connections aren’t what they’re expecting. And they’re vocal about their frustration.

Jon Wisniewski is the network administrator at Neumann University. “Every semester, about three-quarters of help desk complaints were from frustrated students trying to use the WLAN. When students are unhappy, everyone is unhappy.”

The Challenge

It’s difficult to say who was more frustrated with the old Wi-Fi network: the students and faculty or the university’s 12-person IT team. The existing WLAN added a disproportionate amount of operational overhead and expense. “The WLAN wasn’t just unreliable, it wasn’t maintainable by a small IT staff,” says Jon. “We needed a network that supported student productivity and the deployment of new educational models. But we also needed a solution that didn’t require dedicating expensive, full-time IT resources to keep it up and running.”

Requirements
  • Better Wi-Fi coverage, throughput and connectivity across campus, and especially in dorms
  • Ease of deployment and day-to-day management for IT
  • Support more concurrent users on the network
  • Greater flexibility in the wired and wireless networks
  • Easy, secure network onboarding for users and devices
Solutions
  • 4 Ruckus switches provide a high-speed fiber-optic ring around the campus
  • 125 Ruckus switches in wiring closets provide full PoE per port to access points (APs)
  • 300 Ruckus 802.11ac APs deployed
  • Ruckus Wi-Fi controllers
  • Ruckus Cloudpath Enrollment System software
Benefits
  • Student complaints related to Wi-Fi performance dropped (from 75% each semester to less than 1%)
  • Coverage and throughput is strong even in high-interference environments
  • Management software provide a single pane of glass view of the entire WLAN across campus
  • Easy self-service device onboarding for students, supporting a high volume of diverse devices
  • Cloudpath Enrollment System software and controllers provide detailed information on WLAN usage (down to the device level) to support planning
  • Switches and APs support IP-based multicast streaming video for student broadcasts and distance learning
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