A university network supports a broad population of students, faculty and others who all rely on a wireless network to do their work. Consider the user population. A big segment of it grew up with the Internet. And they have little patience for dead spots that don’t provide access to it.
A customer of ours works at a large university in Ohio. There are no less than 2,700 access points on his wireless network. Before he started using WhatsUp Gold from Ipswitch, his team had to physically check wireless network equipment around campus whenever there was a problem. It was wearing patience his patience thin. And the soles on his IT staffs' sneakers. This meant long wait times to resolve issues, and way too many calls made and tickets opened by melodramatic students.
The challenge was to support a group of vocal users who, in some respects, were causing the problems they complained about. There’s an average of three mobile devices per student attached to the network. Vimeo, torrents, and every other bandwidth hog you can imagine steams through the pipes. In other words, it was a BYOD free for all and the IT staff had to keep Internet wireless network connections going strong in light of the chaos.
When our customer decided enough was enough he looked for a product that provided the wireless network performance monitoring features he needed most, and it had to be affordable. He wanted a the ability to accurately map his wireless network, see individual bandwidth usage, check signal strength, and get real-time alerts whenever a problem flared up. After giving WhatsUp Gold a trial run along with a few other vendors’ software products, he chose Ipswitch because it met his criteria and his price point. Since using the product, the phone rings a lot less and sneakers last a lot longer.
If your work involves managing wireless access on a network in higher education, or anywhere else for that matter, please register and join our webinar this Thursday, February 6. During the 30 minute webinar you’ll learn how to best manage the high traffic tides, quickly and easily identify bandwidth hogs and the offending applications, and receive notifications when access points approach capacity.
Hope to see you there. If you can’t make it, we’ll be sharing the replay afterwards.
Title: How to Overcome Challenges of Campus Wireless Network Performance
Date: February 6, 2014
Show Time: 2:00 pm EST
Duration: 30 Minutes