University and college campus networks can be some of the most challenging environments to design and maintain, with so many different classes of users and device types all accessing the network at the same time, from many distinct locations. Professors, administrative staff, and employee network management is enough to keep any decent IT staff occupied – but then you add students! Students arrive on campus at the beginning of the semester, like an invading army equipped with all the latest hot gadgets. And they expect the Wi-Fi to work everywhere, all the time, without connection issues. Wi-Fi has become a necessity in every part of campus life – students today grew up as digital natives, and they don’t know any other way of life.
As if managing a campus network wasn’t already challenging enough, students are trying to access the network with hundreds or thousands of new devices all at the same time, the standards continue to evolve, and more bandwidth is ALWAYS needed. Wi-Fi is one of the most dynamic technologies we’ve seen, working through an alphabet soup of 802.11a, b, g, n, to two waves of 11ac, with more changes coming, even though we’ve run out of letters. Your deployed Wi-Fi on campus could already be in need of a refresh, possibly including a new vendor. How are you going to manage a complex migration project? Is it even possible, let alone smart, to have two different Wi-Fi vendors on a single campus?
To try and simplify the process and ensure it would be adaptable, Ruckus outlined a framework that would work on any campus, big or small, for migrating wired and wireless network vendors. Put simply, think about using the traditional OSI model. Ruckus recommends defining location boundaries and using the OSI model to think through the network needs at each location and each network layer, and how those needs change as users cross location and vendor boundaries. Ruckus even made a handy checklist to help organize your migration planning.
To read Ruckus’ full recommendation, download their white paper: How to Plan a Successful Campus Network Migration. Or, to hear them discuss this method first-hand, listen to their on demand webinar. If you have any questions, give your WAV rep a call today! 800-678-2419
