Santa Clara Unified School District Standardizes on Ruckus Wireless ZoneFlex Smart 802.11n WLANs

Massive Wi-Fi Project Brings Higher Speed and More Reliable Connectivity to Students, Faculty and Guests at 25 Schools in the Bay Area

SUNNYVALE, CA, October 27, 2008 –Ruckus Wireless today announced that it has been selected by the Santa Clara Unified School District (SCUSD) in the heart of Silicon Valley to supply state-of-the-art Wi-Fi systems based on the emerging 802.11n high-speed wireless standard as part of a multi-year project.

After exhaustive evaluation of competitive wireless LAN (WLAN) systems, SCUSD is standardizing on the Ruckus ZoneFlex “Smart Wireless LAN” system which is capable of delivering three to four times the performance and reliability over conventional Wi-Fi technology – at a fraction of the cost.

Under the agreement, Ruckus Wireless is providing next-generation, centrally managed WLAN systems as well as indoor and outdoor access points that SCUSD is installing throughout 25 elementary, middle and high schools as well as adult education facilities and district offices.

SCUSD operates 16 elementary schools, four middle schools, three high schools, and one K-12 school in Santa Clara, as well as parts of San Jose and Sunnyvale. SCUSD supports some 15,000 students and 1,000 staff throughout the district. Expecting to add another 10,000 students by 2025, Santa Clara Unified is recognized for excellence in education and is one of the most well-known and respected districts in California. SCUSD established its first high school in 1890.

“Nowhere is reliable Wi-Fi needed more than within the education market where the environment is fluid, information is rich and demands for consistent connectivity is high,” said Mary Phillips, director of technology at SCUSD. “Up to now Wi-Fi has been largely a science project for most school districts. But now there’s no question that we are headed for an all wireless world and must find a better means to provide more reliable and higher speed connectivity to a wide range of users and applications. We finally found it.”

Unlike conventional 802.11n technology, Smart Wi-Fi from Ruckus Wireless advances the state of wireless through the use of patented RF routing techniques and sophisticated meshing capabilities. Now, for the first time, schools can reliably deploy smarter Wi-Fi infrastructures in half the time, at half the cost, while delivering three times the performance over conventional alternatives.

Moving School Districts to Smarter Wi-Fi

With limited IT resources and budget restraints, SCUSD required a centrally managed Wi-Fi system that could deliver maximum coverage and consistent performance at range with the fewest access points possible and without having to run Ethernet cabling to every AP.

“As a school district, we wanted a unified wireless infrastructure that was flexible and didn’t lock us into a particular architecture or require us to install more cable,” said Phillips. “The Ruckus system lets us deploy access points individually or with a centralized controller -- indoors or outdoors – and with the option to enable wireless meshing if we choose.” Phillips noted that SCUSD had a number of specific requirements for its Wi-Fi infrastructure that included:

  • Native controller interaction with its Active Directory domain authentication system without having to run RADIUS
  • The ability to deploy centralized managed WLAN controllers in the school district data center and wireless access points remotely in each school (with the WLAN controllers and wireless access points on different subnets)
  • 802.11n wireless meshing support for indoor and outdoor APs
  • Streamlined configuration, remote administration and advanced diagnostic capabilities
  • Access points that could function with or without wireless LAN controllers
  • Support for delay-sensitive multimedia services such as voice over IP and video streaming
  • WLAN controllers that don’t sit in-line, requiring all traffic to flow through them.

“We conducted a rigorous evaluation of all the major enterprise 802.11n Wi-Fi systems out there over a four-month period but could only find one that was easy to use, robust and could effectively deliver 802.11n speeds at 802.11g prices,” said Phillips.

Getting Smarter Wi-Fi for Santa Clara Unified School District

According to SCUSD, the Ruckus ZoneFlex system was selected because it offered the most reliable and adaptive 802.11n implementation with a combination of features and capabilities, such as Ruckus-patented BeamFlex technology and Smart Mesh Networking that simply weren’t available in other systems.

SCUSD will begin deploying ZoneFlex Smart WLANs and hundreds of Smart Wi-Fi access points throughout the district. Sanata Clara is deploying redundant Ruckus ZoneDirector ZD3250 WiFi controllers in their data center to manage remote ZoneFlex ZF7942 802.11n/g/b Wi-Fi access points in their schools. A high-speed Gigabit Ethernet WAN provides connectivity between schools.

Since the Ruckus ZoneFlex solution uses a distributed forwarding architecture, once a user has been authenticated to the Wi-Fi network, the Ruckus ZoneFlex system doesn’t require Wi-Fi traffic that is local to a school to be routed across the WAN and through the WLAN controller. “Although our Gigabit Etherent WAN has plenty of capacity, we didn’t like the idea of Wi-Fi traffic that is ‘local’ to a school being routed back and forth across our WAN. As we migrate towards 1:1 computing and 802.11n the volume of Wi-Fi traffic will increase exponentially and we’re in no rush to upgrade the WAN to 10 Gig Ethernet”, said Mary Phillips.

SCUSD is also using ZoneFlex Smart Mesh Networking to provide wireless connectivity to portable buildings. SCUSD is placing Ruckus ZoneFlex 802.11n “meshable” APs in portable buildings, using only the RF domain as the backhaul to the school, eliminating the significant expense of pulling fiber to every portable building. Smart Meshing makes deploying APs without Ethernet cabling attractive to school districts because Ruckus-patented BeamFlex technology enables Wi-Fi signals to be reliably and continuously routed over the best performing RF paths. This lets schools cost-effectively extend Wi-Fi to areas where it’s been virtually impossible to provide Wi-Fi connectivity.

“One of the aspects of the ZoneFlex system we found extremely compelling was its ease-of-use “said Phillips. “The Ruckus ZoneFlex system was also the only one that could directly interface with our Active Director domain. We were able to get it up and running a matter of minutes.”

Phillips says the ability to remotely manage ZoneFlex wireless LANs in each school and not having to run additional Ethernet cabling will be a huge time and cost saver. “It was clear to us that the Ruckus ZoneFlex system was developed specifically for this market and that some real thought was put into the application of this system with respect to educational requirements,” concluded Phillips.