Northern Kentucky University is among the fastest growing universities in Kentucky. It hosts over 15,000 students with about 13,000 undergraduate and 2,000 graduate students. The goal of the wireless program at NKU is to provide secure, robust and ubiquitous wireless access throughout the campus, both indoors and outdoors. This ensures that students always stay connected and feel at home. The classrooms are equipped with smart technology to ensure that the teachers can benefit from technology when collaborating with students. The IT team has blanketed the libraries, the classrooms, the dorm-rooms as well as the outdoor areas with Wi-Fi. In the previous blog in 2012, we described how the Cisco 7.5 release allows networks to recover with no client re-authentication in the rare event of your primarily wireless LAN controller goes down.
At a Glance:
Located in: the Highland Heights Kentucky
Number of students: 15,000 of which about 2000 stay in residence halls
Number of teachers/staff: 2000
#WLAN clients: Approximately 8500 concurrent clients
Access-Point Model and Units: 1200 units of AP models including AP702W, 3502, 3602, 3702, 1550 and a few older Access Points which are being phased out
Controller Model and Units: 2 Pairs of WiSM2 operating in 7.6.120.0
Switch Models: Various models 2960, 3650, 3850, 3750X and 6500
Prime Infrastructure: 1.4.2
Mobility Services Engine: 7.6
Deployment Details:We talked to Christopher Johnson, the Senior Infrastructure Systems Analyst II at Northern Kentucky University to capture some of his thoughts around their choice of this solution and the associated benefits.
A total of 4 SSIDs are deployed in the NKU WLAN environment.
Some of the most interesting aspects of the WLAN Deployment:
If any of you would like to learn more about 802.11ac, High Availability, the Wall-Plate Access Point or AVC please reach out to your local Cisco representative.