Wifi Revolution

Aruba Networks (News - Alert), a provider of wireless LANs and secure mobility platforms, announced that the Calgary Board of Education has started deploying Aruba’s 802.11n Wi-Fi networks across its 217 elementary, middle, high and vocational school campuses serving over 100,000 students.

 

The system is expected to be completed by next year and it will include 2,700 AP-125 802.11n Access Points. The network includes 200, 3000 Series Multi-Service Mobility Controllers and centrally-managed, redundant AirWave (News - Alert) Management Suite (AWMS) servers. Bell Canada a partner of Aruba will be supplying the new system, said company sources.

 

“The new networks are being overlaid on top of existing Aruba 802.11a/b/g networks that have been our wireless workhorses for the past three years,” said Cindy Seibel, Calgary Board of Education’s director of Information Technology Services. “802.11n technology delivers significantly higher throughput with wire-like stability across larger numbers of laptops and other client devices. These benefits pave the way for CBE to aggressively launch high bandwidth electronic learning and video applications starting this year.”

 

Aruba’s Adaptive Radio management –“ARM (News - Alert)” – technology reduces 802.11n deployment and maintenance costs as it automates site surveys and uses infrastructure-based controls for optimizing the performance of Wi-Fi clients in real-time. Wi-Fi clients do not cooperate with other clients and also do not select the optimal band, channel and access point. The problem gets accentuated in environments where there are several computers as in labs and libraries.

 

ARM employs techniques for controlling how Wi-Fi clients interact so as to ensure that data, voice and video applications have enough network resources for operating properly for enhancing the wireless experience.

 

“Multi-media electronic learning applications have demanding bandwidth and jitter requirements, and ARM technology has been proven to enhance 802.11n network performance so these applications work at their best,” said Fran Sanda, Aruba’s operations director for Canada.

 

The Calgary District’s AirWave Wireless Management Suite offers features like network monitoring via Apple iPhone (News - Alert), Windows Mobile, RIM Blackberry and other Web-enabled mobile platforms. This improves problem detection capabilities, diagnostics and resolution. It also enables real-time trending, traffic, usage, capacity, location and status updates along with the ability to rewind and replay data like in device location history. It also supports multiple generations of technology, wireless standards and vendors via a single console interface.

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