Douglas County School District Selects Ruckus Wireless for Next Gen 802.11n
Wi-Fi Infrastructure across 12-School System
Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi Equipment Chosen to Support Standardized Electronic MAP Testing, Wireless VOIP Handsets, Video on Demand and Growing Use of Smart Phones for Email and Internet Access
SUNNYVALE, CA, February 1, 2010 – Ruckus Wireless™, the smart mobile internetworking company, today announced that the Douglas County School District (DCSD) in Nevada selected Ruckus to provide advanced “Smart Wi-Fi” products and technology for campus-wide 802.11n networks at its 12 K-12 schools and two administrative offices.
“Like many schools across this country, wireless is no longer just an option, it’s a necessity,” said Eric Ristine, IT Director at Douglas County School District. “The problem was finding a wireless system that could cope with constant changes in the RF environment, provide ubiquitous signal coverage and consistent performance while maintaining stable connectivity to clients. In short, that’s what we needed and that’s what the Ruckus Wi-Fi system does.”
According to DCSD, the primary driver for wireless was to enable a mobile solution within its schools for implementing state-mandated MAP (Measured Achievement Progress) testing. Beyond that, DCSD wanted to use the network to support voice, video-on-demand, electronic whiteboard and emerging iPhone/smart phone applications.
“We completely underestimated the power of combining dynamic beamforming and 802.11n,” said Ristine. “Because beamforming provides a much more reliable wireless infrastructure and 802.11n gives us much higher data rates, we are now in a position to throw anything and everything on the wireless network – from IP-based voice to video on demand.”
DCSD chose the Ruckus ZoneFlex Smart Wireless LAN (WLAN) system to provide ubiquitous, campus-wide wireless coverage to more than 6,400 students and 750 faculty at its seven elementary schools, three middle schools, two high schools, the main district office and a facility at the Minden airport that houses the district IT staff as well as vehicles, grounds maintenance and buses.
Out with the Old, In with the Ruckus
The new wireless infrastructure replaces a legacy HP ProCurve 802.11b/g network. DCSD originally installed HP ProCurve 420 access points to support MAP testing, typically performed via wireless laptop computer carts. Unfortunately, according to DCSD, the HP ProCurve wireless network was unstable, had hit-or-miss coverage, poor signal strength and provided no way to manage the wireless network centrally as a single, unified infrastructure.
“Our legacy APs caused us more problems than they solved and it was only getting worse as more and more wireless devices were hitting our campuses,” said David Monachino, network engineer at Douglas County School District. “Given the orientation of the clients, sometimes the APs could penetrate cinderblock walls and other times they couldn’t. They also dropped too many packets, which was a killer for our MAP testing software, which just doesn’t tolerate any sort of latency,” said Monachino. “With Ruckus dynamic beamforming, this problem is gone.”
Unlike other Wi-Fi technologies, as client devices change their orientation or move, the smart antenna system integrated within each AP continually selects the best transmission path for every packet to each client. This ensures the highest possible data rate and lowest packet error rate. Conventional Wi-Fi access points are unable to achieve this level of adaptability with their omni-directional antennas.
“If you rotate laptop 90 degrees, you often see a dramatic change in performance,” said Monachino. “This might be acceptable for surfing the Internet, but for latency-sensitive applications like our MAP testing, as well as for voice and video applications, it’s a real killer.”
DCSD has now deployed 60+ ZoneFlex dual-band indoor and outdoor 802.11n access points across its 14 locations to provide complete coverage at each site. It uses Ruckus’ smart meshing capability to provide wireless service to field and temporary classrooms where pulling Ethernet cabling is not desirable and sometimes not possible. Ruckus ZoneDirector controllers at each school provide local management of the wireless LAN. A high-speed fiber hub-and-spoke backbone provides 30 Mbps downlinks to all schools and 10 Mbps uplinks into the NOC. The DCSD IT staff uses the Ruckus FlexMaster remote Wi-Fi management software as a single point of configuration, event and firmware management system.
“This technology opens up lots of possibilities for us,” Monachino said. “We are using outdoor APs to flood the press box at our stadiums and plan to start delivering video on demand to classrooms. We will also be using the wireless network for school orientation, allowing students to register online right there in the auditorium. Given the choice between wires and no wires, everyone choose no wires – but only if the wireless network is reliable. In our mind, Ruckus has redefined reliability for wireless to the point where we now view the wireless network as a utility.”
Email
- Videos
- Podcasts
-
Learn more about 802.11n from our developers - Webinars
-
Webinar: Demystifying BeamForming
- Data Sheets
-
FlexMaster (2.1 MB) ZoneDirector 1000 (1.3 MB) ZoneFlex 7962 (1.5 MB) - White Papers
-
The Real Cost of 802.11n for the Enterprise Redefining WLAN Economics with SmartMeshing Delivering the 802.11n promise with Smart Wi-Fi Demystifying Beamforming
Press Releases
