Your Classrooms Are Like City Business Centers

In many ways, a modern university is akin to a small city, complete with residential areas (dorms), a city hall (administrative buildings), and commercial districts (student unions and retail). The more a university population grows, the more the campus mirrors the challenges faced by small cities. In some cases, the largest universities during peak season have already surpassed the size of the biggest cities in Delaware and Maine.

So, if your campus is actually a small city, then your classrooms and lecture halls are the business centers of your mini-city—a beating heart of academia that feeds off your wireless network. It’s here that strong, reliable Wi-Fi® is the price of admission to compete in higher education. To attract new students, you can’t overlook technology.

In these classrooms and lecture halls, it’s common to find lecture podiums with built-in audio-visual capabilities and controls, as well as rooms with IoT lighting and environmental controls. Plus, faculty and students often have two or three devices connecting to the Wi-Fi network simultaneously—not to mention smartboards for enhanced learning. With some lecture halls able to hold up to 300 students, the amount of wireless traffic in just one room would be enough to choke most ordinary networks. 

And don’t forget: This traffic multiplies when you add the variety of working spaces for practical studies, small group learning and, of course, program-specific research labs that deal in huge datasets and detailed images.

As if that’s not enough ways to challenge your Wi-Fi, campuses often have a mix of old, historic buildings with multiple floors and dense materials that attenuate signals, in addition to modern facilities with specialized equipment that can cause interference. These are real issues that cannot be ignored.

Fortunately, RUCKUS® solutions were designed to overcome issues such as these. With its BeamFlex+® adaptive antenna technology, our access points (APs) dynamically direct signals toward each device. This helps reduce interference, boosts capacity and allows for a stronger, more-focused transmission. That’s why institutions like Del Mar College and Butler University turned to RUCKUS for their campus network refresh.

But RUCKUS engineering goes beyond simply offering better APs (as shown in the latest stress test). Our high-performance ICX® switches stand out amongst the competition by being highly efficient through POE+ technology, more fault tolerant with Multi-Chassis Trunking (MCT), and the best stackable options of up to 12 units and as far as 10 kilometers apart. These are a just few of the reasons Penn State University chose RUCKUS switches to cover their more than 5,000-acre small city campus.

To learn how RUCKUS can help your entire campus achieve Wi-Fi excellence in your network update or refresh, check out our “Your Campus Is a Small City” infographic.

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Read the other blogs in this series:

• Your Campus Is Actually a Small City
• Campus Libraries Have the Same Needs as Those of a Small City 
• Like City Hall in Small Cities, Administration Is Critical to Your Campus-City
• When a Campus Becomes a Small City Overnight
• Student Centers: The Commercial Districts of Your Small City
• Student Housing Is Like a Small City’s Residential Neighborhood