Kathy Gibson reports from Huawei Network Congress in Beijing – Stellenbosch University has deployed the first academic campus-wide Huawei Agile network in South Africa.
Joe Smit, IT director: services and operations at Stellenbosch University, says the project was designed to give lecturers and students greater mobility across the campus.
He points out that Stellenbosch has some unusual issues around mobile networking in that the university isn’t a closed campus, but is part of the town’s infrastructure.
“The major issues we faced were around bandwidth and connectivity,” he says. “Students and lecturers want to be connected everywhere, and mobile connectivity has become a major issue, especially for the students. We now have about three times more mobile-registered devices on our network than wired devices – some students have five mobile devices. So the demand for stable WiFi was one of the major challenges.”
Initially, WiFi access was problematic and the university found that an earlier system of unmanaged access points (Aps) quickly became unmanageable. The decision was made to standardise on Huawei’s Agile Network, and this was instrumental in finding a solution to the WiFi issues.
“Huawei did a lot of research into making it stable,” says Smit. “In the engineering faculty especially, it was a huge challenge to get it stabilised.
“We had three Huawei engineers on campus for three weeks, and they actually developed new code for our environment and the WiFi is now really stable.”
Stellenbosch connects to the Internet via Tennet, and all the buildings on the campus are linked with fibre. Wireless Aps bring WiFi to the 30 000 students and 4 500 staff members at the institution.
Network connections are available in every room on the campus, with an average of one AP for 20 people.
“Starting to deploy WiFi in the residences as well because students use mobile devices,” Smit sasy.
The campus-wide Agile Network is part of a bigger ICT project that includes bringing ICT into the classroom, Smit explains.
“The project will roll out over a five-year period. It is part of the university’s strategy to use ICT as a teaching strategy. Without ICT nothing can happen.”
Smit can’t put a cost on the system, but says there is enough funding available to ensure there’s enough WiFi and all network connections are operational.
The university is experiencing rapid growth in Internet usage – in fact, it has doubled every year for the last 20 years, says Smit.
Students have free access to academic resources, but pay a nominal amount for non-academic downloads.
The Agile Network helps to manage this policy, and in shaping bandwidth for specified applications. Smit believes the manageability inherent in the platform will allow for more solutions in the future. “We will be able to use it for
Internet access and even billing – there’s a lot that can be done. Agile Networking offers a lot in terms of security, network access and control for both wired and wireless networking,” he says.
Other future plans include covering the whole campus with WiFi access, and adding the ability to locate students in case of emergencies.
“This is a true partnership, and I think the users are pleased with the system so far.”