"Universities have a critical dual mission: take a leadership role in technological innovation while ensuring its future through technology-literate graduates. WLAN is an essential component in fulfilling these objectives."

Universities in the 21st Century must ensure that students have the technology background to make effective contributions in the post-graduation world. To achieve this, they need to be able to access networks anywhere on campus, and an Extricom WLAN is the best technology for making this a reality.

The range of benefits that deploying WLAN brings to higher educational institutions include:

• Cost-effective and easily scalable means of quickly building out networks to provide access wherever needed.
• Enable mobile, team-based collaboration and research across multiple disciplines, a core mission of any university.
• Support multiple separate networks from one infrastructure to serve a variety of scenarios from student dormitories to advanced research labs.
• Make the All Wireless Campus a reality: anytime, anywhere access to servers, lectures, student information systems, and on-line exams.

Unique Challenges of Higher Education

Expansion of wireless networks into higher education means overcoming some technilogical hurdles, including:

• The university campus is inherently a user-dense environment, which poses system capacity challenges.
  
• Technology-savvy users demand advanced, bandwidth-hungry applications, often with conflicting network requirements.
  
• IT organizations have little control over a multiplicity of
  clients accessing the network.
  
  

Extricom: WLAN Architecture Built for Higher Education

 

CORE REQUIREMENTS			EXTRICOM UNIQUE VALUE
Reliable, Comprehensive Communications: WLAN must be resilient, able to support high user densities, and avoid connectivity outages that directly impact a student's ability to work.			Guaranteed Service: Extricom WLAN technology delivers a guaranteed and consistent data rate throughout the coverage area.
Support Highly Mobile Users: The wireless network must meet performance needs of continually mobile users without roaming and re-authentication issues.			Multi-Layer Channel Blanket: Unique infrastructure provides maximum bandwidth, mobility, and coverage to all users.
Ease of Use and Scalability: Quick installation to meet changing space needs, and the ability to handle a dynamic RF environment are critical.			The Lowest Cost of Ownership: Extricom's solution eliminates the cost of RF cell planning, and is deployed and maintained with plug-and-play simplicity, making it easily scalable to accommodate changing needs.
Multiple Security Profiles: Data integrity and student online security are mandatory, and systems must support a wide variety of clients with varying levels of security.			Secure and Convenient: Extricom solutions are based on the strongest security available, without sacrificing mobility or performance, and can integrate with any security model.

The Future of Wi-Fi

Institutions of higher education clearly see the importance of Wi-Fi to their success. The question is: how confident is your IT staff that today's technologies can meet the current and future demands of their environment?

Ask us how Universities and Colleges have succeeded with Extricom. Extricom's Wireless LAN is specifically designed to answer the challenges posed by pervasive Wi-Fi, providing the high-performance, resilient, and future-proof infrastructure required in a higher education environment.

For more information on how an Extricom WLAN can help you achieve your goals, fill out our contact form or visit the Products section of Extricom's website.