Higher Education
Elevate the Student Experience with Campus Wi-Fi

Students view campus Wi-Fi as a utility, not only in the classroom, but especially in the residence hall-as basic as electricity or running water. Accessing high-bandwidth video, gaming, class materials, and social applications is a large part of engaging in campus life. By asking students to spend years at your institution, you need to be prepared to give them the same kind of social, mobile and connected experiences on campus that they have at home.

To do this, you need to onboard and manage thousands of diverse devices without creating headaches for users and the help desk, deliver consistent performance across every dorm room with access points built for education, and accommodate guests using University Wi-Fi, without compromising security.

It's a lot pressure-the kind that makes students tweet out complaints to the Chancellor. Don't stress- RUCKUS can help.

Home-Away-From-Home

According to the 2016 State of RESNET Report, 73% of business officers consider “at home” quality network connection important to attract and retain students. Yet, only half of campuses limit ResHall bandwidth to optimize the student experience.

College students grew up as digital natives, with access to high-speed Wi-Fi networks regularly. They expect the same digital experience in their dorm that they had at home, with wicked fast download speeds and automatic connectivity of all devices. Instead, students get to campus and consistently lose Wi-Fi connections and can’t load videos or remember their passwords, leading them to submit endless help-desk tickets - or worse, plugging in their own router. Don’t worry - we can fix that.

Hassle-Free Access

40% of IT service desks volume is password related, with an annual cost of $118 per student on password resets. Wouldn't you like to spend that time and money elsewhere?

Not only do passwords affect IT, they greatly impact the student experience. Students expect to easily and securely connect and use their devices as they arrive on campus and return from a weekend with new devices. Unfortunately, this is not always the case, with campus Wi-Fi portals requiring a login each time there is a disconnect and mandatory password changes every 6 months. This leads to students having to login 10+ times per day or being locked out of their devices. Ditch the passwords and move to a simple certificate-based solution with RUCKUS Cloudpath.

Connect Anywhere on Campus

According to the 2016 State of RESNET Report, 83% of campuses provide Wi-Fi coverage throughout 80% of their campus. While this is immense progress, students need to be able to connect to any device, anywhere on campus.

From the lecture hall to the residence hall, the library to the student union, the outdoor quad to the laundry basement, students expect perfect Wi-Fi. They want to do homework in the outdoor quad and stream Netflix from their dorm room without interruption. Luckily, with RUCKUS adaptive antenna technology, your Wi-Fi infrastructure can dynamically optimize for each device connecting to it, continually reconfiguring itself to address interference, high device density, and coverage problems in real time.

Secure Onboarding

Delivering uninterrupted Wi-Fi in a secure, user-friendly, and scalable manner is imperative for Higher Education. The Cloudpath Enrollment System makes it simple.

The expectation on campus that Wi-Fi connectivity is easy and predictable is higher than ever. Users expect to connect quickly, easily and conveniently. Once connected, they expect their devices to work throughout the year without disruption. As the Wi-Fi network has grown from a luxury to an expectation, the value of WiFi connectivity has multiplied, leading to always-connected options like eduroam. Meanwhile, the number of devices and the types of devices are expanding, making it more difficult to establish a favorable first impression.

Today, as the de facto standard for supporting large populations of unmanaged devices, hundreds of universities use Cloudpath to onboard millions of student devices around the globe.

Cloudpath ES allows secure Wi-Fi to be extended to all users on all devices. The simple, yet powerful workflow engine enables nearly any use case that one can conjure to include visitors, alumni, contractors and more. Cloudpath ES supports the full range of guest access mechanisms, including sponsorship, social media, custom OAuth, one-time-passwords, vouchers and more. Unlike traditional guest servers that leave these users on unencrypted and open Wi-Fi, Cloudpath ES automatically moves them to WPA2-Enterprise.

Cloudpath ES also supports device registration, providing an easy mechanism for users to enroll gaming devices such as Xbox or PlayStation consoles. After registration, the device may be granted access to a WPA2-PSK wireless network, wherein access is restricted by PSK and MAC address.

Cloudpath ES, with its Set-It-And-Forget-It Wi-Fi capabilities makes EAP-TLS the new standard for secure Wi-Fi in higher education. Cloudpath ES offers secure, automated, device lifecycle management to simplify the adoption of standards-based WiFi networks for scalable BYOD environments, including:

• Extend WPA2-Enterprise to all users; including visitors, alumni and contractors for a uniform wireless approach.
• Eliminate the negative impact of password change policies on the wireless experience.
• Increase security by replacing PEAP with EAP-TLS, and eliminate the caching and transmission of passwords on every connection.
• Provide unmatched visibility and reporting related to users, devices and policies.
• Eliminate captive portal fatigue associated with repeated logins.
• Provide an easy-to-use, predictable onboarding experience, leading to higher Wi-Fi satisfaction among users.
• Reduce support costs by significantly decreasing wireless-related trouble tickets.
• Provide a proven model for eduroam participation.