Historic Urban College Addresses Current Networking Needs and Prepares for the Future with Campus-wide Indoor and Outdoor Wi-Fi
Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company (NYSE: HPE), today announced
that the College of Charleston, the oldest college in South Carolina and
one of the oldest in the United States, has deployed an Aruba
mobile-first network to deliver secure, high-performance wireless access
across its 900 acre urban campus including 130+ buildings, outdoor
meeting areas, its plantation research area, athletic fields and arenas.
The new infrastructure not only delivers a measurably greater user
experience but also reduces IT workloads and enables centralized
management to allow IT more time to focus on strategic projects.
Founded in 1770, College of Charleston is dedicated to preserving its
historic campus, but wanted to bring its aging technology into the 21st
century. The College needed to replace an underperforming Xirrus network
with a reliable Gigabit Wi-Fi network, and expand coverage in new
buildings with higher bandwidth requirements. According to Jason
Trinklein, Wireless Engineering Manager for College of Charleston, the
wireless network must perform like any other utility.
“You can’t run a campus without an active water supply or electricity,”
said Trinklein. “Increasingly, you can’t run a campus without a reliable
wireless network either.”
Some of the challenges Trinklein faced with the College’s existing
network included constant service problems due to bugs in the
infrastructure, failing hardware, poor manageability, and a lack of
visibility into network problem spots, channel utilization and user
performance. These issues led to frequent complaints regarding Wi-Fi
performance from students and staff, and much of IT’s time and resources
focused on help desk tickets.
To address these problems, Trinklein and the IT team ran a Proof of
Concept evaluation with Xirrus, Ruckus and Aruba in what Trinklein calls
a “wireless shoot-out.” According to Trinklein, Aruba emerged as the
clear winner.
“Aruba clearly delivered higher bandwidth, more powerful and pervasive
connectivity, and with AirWave network management, allowed our team to
not only identify network problems, but to be proactive in detecting
where coverage problems might occur, ahead of time,” Trinklein said.
The College installed over 1,100 Aruba indoor and outdoor access points,
using the latest ArubaOS
8 software, along with AirWave network management which Trinklein
says is key to the team’s ability to monitor and manage the network’s
performance and radio resources effectively. In particular, Trinklein
considers Aruba’s AirMatch feature to be “second to none” in helping the
College better plan and assign the RF for their campus network.
“The machine learning algorithm in AirMatch has been so effective,” he
noted. “It automatically optimizes the radio resources – so we can even
run some classrooms at 80 MHz channel width – which is unheard of in the
academic environment.”
The result is improved productivity and reduced costs for the College’s
IT team, as well as more reliable connectivity for users across the
campus. IT has seen a dramatic decrease in help desk tickets and even
receives frequent compliments on the wireless network. The College’s
classrooms – in particular the Computer Science and Business departments
which run advanced applications and make frequent use of Apple TVs – are
now experiencing more dependable wireless connectivity at high capacity,
and can support projects such as the College’s student-led
entrepreneurial program which had been hampered previously by the old
wireless infrastructure.
College of Charleston has also extended its coverage to TD Arena, a
5,500-seat basketball arena, to give high-speed Internet to students
attending games. Trinklein says the IT team is also evaluating using
their location-ready wireless access points with Aruba Beacons and the
Meridian Mobile App Platform to deliver turn-by-turn directions and
proximity notifications in dining halls and art exhibition areas, as
well as Aruba Asset Tags for easier and more automated inventory of
campus computers. The College is also seeing increasing demand for
digital signage and ticket scanners in their athletics facilities and
are determining how to integrate these, and other IoT devices and
applications, onto the network.
“With a reliable and high-performing wireless foundation, we’re not only
delivering what students and faculty need now, but we’re finally able to
look ahead to the kinds of innovative applications and services that
could be possible in the future,” said Trinklein.
About Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company
Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, is a leading provider of
next-generation networking solutions for enterprises of all sizes
worldwide. The company delivers IT solutions that empower organizations
to serve the latest generation of mobile-savvy users who rely on
cloud-based business apps for every aspect of their work and personal
lives.
To learn more, visit Aruba at
http://www.arubanetworks.com
.
For real-time news updates follow Aruba on Twitter and Facebook,
and for the latest technical discussions on mobility and Aruba products
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http://community.arubanetworks.com
.
Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company
Pavel Radda, +1-408-419-0294
pavel.radda@hpe.com
or
Lori Hultin, +1-818-879-4651
lori.hultin@hpe.com