How Higher Ed Taps Wi-Fi 6E to Expand Wireless Access

Wi-Fi 6E Upgrades Address Wireless Challenges on Campus

Higher ed IT leaders who have undertaken a migration to Wi-Fi 6E describe a common set of motivations. Students may already be facing connectivity challenges, and many are looking to future-proof their tech in support of emerging needs.

At Oral Roberts University, Mathews recently upgraded to Wi-Fi 6E campuswide. He was looking to expand connectivity and to make the most of his investment in high-speed internet.

“We have internet with an incredibly fast rate of speed, but if the data’s congested on campus, that it doesn’t help us. We’re not getting full value from our internet connection running at 8 gigs if we can’t pass 6 gigs through efficiently,” he says. “With 6E, it adds even more separation on the channels, which means your network gets less congested.”

At the University of Richmond, Vice President and CIO Keith W. “Mac” McIntosh turned to 6E to keep pace with demand.

“Our existing wireless data network was installed back in summer 2017, and it’s based on the previous 802.11 technology,” he says. “This will provide our faculty, staff and students with leading-edge wireless technology.”

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As part of the overall IT strategic plan, “we want to make sure we future-proof our campus,” he says. “The demand for wireless continues to increase, and we know that Wi-Fi 6E offers less congestion, especially for our high-density student housing and classroom areas.”

At the University of Missouri System, meanwhile, IT Vice President and CIO Ben Canlas was already feeling the pinch. “We have had reports of connectivity issues, and with some of these older buildings, our wireless did not reach some of the nooks and crannies. We had concerns about network reliability and performance,” he says.

His ongoing Wi-Fi 6E effort “actually started out as a lifecycle refresh project. We have some aging hardware that is reaching the end of its life, and our initial project scope was to replace the core network hardware,” he says.

“As we talked to our customers and our campus constituents, we got a greater understanding of some of the challenges that they have in carrying out their missions: research, teaching and learning,” he says. “So, we expanded it to be more of a modernization project.”

Universities Develop Strategies for Replacing Hardware

In support of their migration efforts, each of these campus leaders took a strategic approach to evaluating the infrastructure and determining new hardware requirements.

“We made sure we had the right fiber lines and redundant circuitry so that the throughput really will work. It would be foolish for us to go to 6E and then we find out our internet pipe can’t even process that. We’ll just have a different problem on our hands,” Mathews says.

He considered the buildings themselves and the fiber optics under the ground. “We looked at the topology and also the routers and how they’re configured for that underground fiber-optic connection,” he says. All of this helps to guide an implementation that includes the use of ExtremeSwitching, ExtremeAnalytics and Extreme wireless products.

McIntosh likewise surveyed the campus landscape and saw a growing need for new hardware in support of outdoor connectivity.

“We have quad areas that are wide open. We have this place called the Forum where students congregate. It sits between our chapel and our dining hall,” he says. There’s also the Eco-Corridor, an outdoor biology learning environment adjacent to campus. The IT team decided to offer Wi-Fi access there so students can stay connected while they’re working in the field.

All of this helped to drive adoption of next-generation Aruba equipment.

“We have existing wireless Aruba access points and switches, and we’re moving to their newer models. There is an Aruba AP-577 access point and an Aruba AP-534 external and antenna access point,” McIntosh says. “We use the Aruba 500H series hospitality access point and the Aruba AP-635 access points, which are the primary ones being deployed throughout the campus. For our back-end infrastructure, we are using the Aruba CX 6300M 24-port Smart Rate switch.”

At the University of Missouri, Canlas took a multifaceted approach to evaluating hardware overhaul needs.

“Our first and largest effort was to get a lay of the land,” he says. “We actually sent our networking team and some of our student employees out with scanning hardware in a backpack. For all of our 150 buildings, we created a heat map of where we were having connectivity issues and speed issues.”

The team analyzed trouble-ticket data to identify campus locations where connectivity was a problem. They also looked at the age and amount of existing hardware in each building.

“One of our identified needs was to increase the number of access points across campus,” particularly in support of teaching and learning spaces, Canlas says. “We focused our prioritization on those areas that directly contributed to academic mission.”

With all of that in mind, the upgrade will include “a 30 percent increase in total access points, so that we can reach every corner of every room in these buildings we’re serving,” he says. “We’re using Cisco 9166 access points. We will have around just under 5,000 of those deployed across campus: That’s 150 buildings serving about 32,000 students and around 10,000 faculty and staff. We’re also using Cisco 9800 wireless controllers.”

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Communication and Testing Are Key to a Successful Upgrade

Clearly, a lot of effort goes into setting strategy for a Wi-Fi hardware upgrade. Matthew says the improved throughput has been well worth it. “Now it’s like a hot knife going through butter,” he says.

“In our most extreme case, we have 900 students in a single class all trying to access the Wi-Fi in a split second in order to do a quiz,” he says. “In the past, maybe 20 percent of students might have a challenge connecting. Now, it just works flawlessly.”

Campus IT leaders offer a few practical tips for achieving these outcomes.

McIntosh says it’s important to get the money organized early on. “This is a large capital outlay. You have to plan and prepare and actually request funds from the board of trustees and the business management committee,” he says.

When he makes his pitch, “I try to talk about the technology, what it does and what it provides. More important, I put some stories on top of that about how our faculty and staff and students are using wireless,” he says. “Then I talk about the capabilities of the existing infrastructure and what the benefits will be” of an upgrade.

Canlas emphasizes the importance of strong communication in driving a successful Wi-Fi 6E rollout.

“Communication can be as tactical as saying, ‘We’re going to take down the network in your building for four hours on Friday or Saturday. Please be prepared for that,’” he says. “If you don’t tell people that this is what you’re doing, there’s going to be added frustration with the services that you’re providing.”

Overall, “it’s about marketing the technology that you’re implementing,” Canlas says. “You need to let people know that you have heard they are having problems and that you are resolving those issues by increasing your access point count.”

Finally, Mathews says, it’s important to test the new environment before taking it live.

“You do not want the first test to be with 900 people in the classroom,” he says. His team uses automated tools to confirm signals in various spaces, “and we’ll do the manual test too: Go lurk in the back of the classroom and make sure that every area is covered.”

With a solid hardware evaluation strategy, higher ed IT teams can get insight into their current Wi-Fi usage and determine how best to deploy new equipment as they seek to leverage the improved performance inherent in Wi-Fi 6E. With greater capacity and enhanced throughput, they’ll be able to future-proof their campuses in the face of ever-expanding wireless demands.