Enhancing the 800 students learning experience through high-performance Wi-Fi 6 Technology

Background

Laptops, tablets, and mobile phones have taken part in daily teaching & learning in the United States. One of FS's clients, a modern junior high school, housing over 800 students and 187 staff members with complete educational facilities, requires to upgrade campus network so as to catch up with the ever-growing campus information development and meet the urgent demands of network access used for teaching and learning. FS campus network solution can provide full coverage, high-bandwidth, and high-security wireless access with easy O&M, paving the way for its smart education prospects.

Challenge

• With the increase of digital education devices, IP phones, and IP cameras in the existing learning & teaching buildings, the library, the dormitory, etc., the network services were getting more diverse. The original 100M bandwidth that the school adopted was unable to meet the requirements of smart education for campus networks, which needed to be upgraded desperately.

• The campus network provided great convenience to both teachers and students but also with huge potential risks for network security, especially when a large number of visiting parents and other invited visitors arrived as network guests requiring access to the Internet. As a result, the students and the staff were likely to be threatened by unsuitable content and unauthorized attendees due to the vulnerable network security safeguard. The improvement of the traditional campus network security was also on the agenda.

• 95% of the school's current network managements were manual operations. What's worse, the lack of sufficient IT administrators made the O&M process slower and harder. With such a time-consuming and error-prone network management mode, the teaching quality and educational process were deadly influenced eventually. Therefore, reducing difficulty and improving the efficiency of network management to ensure daily orderly teaching & learning were of great urgency.

Solution

Two high-end core S5860-20SQ switches were centered in the master control machine room of the school. It not only built a high-performance wired network environment but also fit for the network expansion in the next three to five years.

Aggregation S5860-20SQ switches were deployed in different buildings, 10G for access and 25G for uplink, fulfilling the high-performance converge needs; access S3910-48TS and PoE S3410-24TS-P switches were scattered in different floors, allowing kinds of network devices like PCs, APs, IP phones, IP cameras to access in Gigabit, which would satisfy the high-density user requirements fully.

The adopted gateways were equipped with functions like traffic control, load balancing, online behavior management, etc., which ensured the security of teachers' teaching resources and created a green and safe network environment for both teachers and students.

Wireless LAN controller functioned as the central manager featuring high reliability with AC virtualization technology, which ensured no business downtime in the event of one of AC failed. Wi-Fi services would resume immediately in backup AC within milliseconds.

Customer Benefits

• The teaching & learning quality has been improved via efficient wireless network. Access switches, supporting full-port wire-speed forwarding, have optimized the seamless digital teaching and learning experience for teachers and students. Ultra-fast Wi-Fi 6 coverage in learning & teaching buildings, the library, the dormitory etc. has met the diverse needs of teachers and students for wireless access.

• The potential network risks have been minimized to protect teachers & students' info safety. Isolating different wireless guests via wireless network SSID and VLAN binding safely, and allocating teachers/students and visitors network access permission quickly, which has benefited both work and study without permitting malware into the network or sacrificing important and sensitive information.

• The campus network O&M has been simplified with less OPEX. The core switches with abundant functions provide convenience for networking and the AC controllers offer unified configuration and centralized management for APs, largely ease the burden of the IT admins. Time, money and efforts used on network management, modification, or troubleshooting have been reduced largely. The reliable network environment has contributed to the smooth daily teaching process.