Wifi Revolution

Norwood School in Bethesda, Maryland has reportedly deployed Aruba's 802.11n Wi-Fi network across its 40-acre campus which supports real-time video broadcasts to networked projectors, very densely deployed tablet computers, and parallel secure and guest access networks.

 

Aruba was selected after a series of tests, for its easy network management and the performance of its adaptive 802.11n architecture which is optimized to ensure that users are always within reach of mission-critical information and enforces Identity-based security which assigns access policies to users.

 

Norwood School used Cisco’s (News - Alert) Fat AP network which required extensive manual channel and signal strength planning. That system was replaced with a single-channel network that proved unable to handle the projector broadcasts and was subsequently replaced by Aruba.

 

Aruba's ICSA-certified policy-enforcement firewall is used in the school to screen guest access and strictly policing resources allowed to access and control the bandwidth they consume.

 

David Rossell, Norwood's Administrator of Network Services and Planning said that "Arguably the most important part of our technical system is the wireless network. For these initiatives to be effective, the Wi-Fi network must support our bandwidth-intensive projector and file system use and work with densely-deployed clients in classrooms. And it has to work flawlessly all the time every time.”

 

“What impressed us most about Aruba's system is that it just worked out of the box. We spent almost a year trying to make a competitor's deployment work in our environment, only to see the network fail again and again when traffic spiked at the beginning of class periods. Aruba's network handled the load effortlessly," said Rossell.

 

Officials at Aruba said that their Adaptive Radio Management (ARM (News - Alert)) technology lowers Wi-Fi deployment and maintenance costs by automating site surveys and using infrastructure-based controls to optimize the performance of Wi-Fi clients in real-time.

 

ARM controls Wi-Fi client interaction and also ensures that 802.11n data, voice, and video applications have sufficient network resources to operate properly.

 

California-based Aruba Networks (News - Alert) offers centralized multi-vendor network management and unified mobility solutions that include Wi-Fi networks, identity-based security, remote access and cellular services.  

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