Wifi Revolution

Washington and Lee University, a private university in Lexington, Virginia, is reportedly deploying Aruba's 802.11n Wi-Fi network across its 55 acre college campus.

 

Founded in 1749, the Washington and Lee University has more than 2,100 students and 215 faculties. According to the sources, Aruba, and authorized integration partner DNS were selected by the University to securely support 802.11n and new devices, such as the Apple (News - Alert)(R) iPhone(TM), surpassed the capabilities of the legacy network.

 

The university is managing these latest devices using Aruba's policy enforcement firewall together with Bradford's endpoint compliance system. These systems force students to keep security and operating system patches up-to-date or be quarantined from the network until they do so. 802.1X is used to authenticate all guests.

 

"We took advantage of our migration to 802.11n to rectify pain points associated with client interoperability, endpoint compliance, and guest registration," said Rick Peterson, Washington and Lee's CTO. He said that, Apple iPhones and other clients brought on campus by students presented a challenge to their old network, which is now supported by Aruba.

 

"The solution deployed by Aruba partner DNS remedied all of the issues we experienced with our legacy BlueSocket, Enterasys (News - Alert), and Trapeze systems, and we look forward to further expanding our new network in the months and years ahead," added Peterson.

 

The university is utilising Aruba’s 802.11n and 802.11a/b/g access points. University can upgrade from 802.11a/b/g access points to 802.11n Draft 2.0 operation over the network any time by entering a license key. This will lower the cost of the initial deployment and migrate to 802.11n on a schedule and budget that works best, says Aruba. The access points are managed by Aruba 3600 Multi-Service Mobility Controllers.

 

"Interoperability with consumer devices like the iPhone (News - Alert) has become table stakes in the education market and is a major priority for Aruba," said Robert Fenstermacher, Aruba's head of education marketing.

 

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

 

 

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