A Future-Ready Network for Your Smart Campus Technology
Today’s students are more demanding and more digital savvy. They want to communicate through social channels wherever they are and share their experiences with friends. They expect access to video lectures, class discussion forums, and assignments from anywhere and at any time. And they want to take advantage of the latest immersive learning experiences using augmented and virtual reality.
This requires reliable, secure and pervasive connectivity. Prospective students test wireless signal strength on the campus tour. If yours isn’t up to scratch, you could miss out on attracting the brightest new talent to your university or college.
Your network is also the essential framework that enables you to leverage the latest technology—like the Internet of Things (IoT)—to help improve operational efficiency, student safety and sustainability. And it’s vital to giving faculty and staff access to the systems and data they need to do their jobs efficiently, no matter how intensive or secure the bandwidth need, or which campus within the university system they’re working from.
To achieve your digital transformation, you first need to transform your network. But delivering seamless connectivity for your smart campus is far from straightforward. Sourcing, installing and managing both wired and wireless networks can involve working with multiple vendors to get all the components working together. This complexity can be expensive and difficult to manage. When something goes wrong you might have to deal with multiple help desks—and that can take up your precious time and drag out the problem. Verizon has teamed up with Extreme Networks to make campus connectivity easier.
Simplified Connectivity with One Managed Solution
Together, Verizon and Extreme Networks can help you deploy your smart campus by managing all your connectivity needs. Extreme Networks can provide you with high-performance Wi-Fi, intelligent local area networking (LAN) and switching to give you secure and reliable connectivity to all your end devices.
Verizon delivers the wide area network (WAN), connecting you securely and reliably to your cloud resources and the outside world. Verizon also provides the structured cabling to connect, and the know-how to configure, the network access points across your campuses, residential halls, sports venues and research institutes. That means you can leverage the expertise of both companies. Instead of having to handle multiple suppliers and orchestrate multiple delivery and installation dates, you get a single point of contact.
Performance and Resilience
With so many users on your network at any one time, managing users and maintaining reliability can be challenging. It’s not just faculty, staff and students; you probably need to support people attending academic events, business visitors, and people watching your sports and arts events. That could mean many thousands of individual users each month. Verizon and Extreme Networks can provide you with a high-performance network that provides highspeed, reliable connectivity across your whole estate. Our networking solutions use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to automatically route network traffic and balance loads. By prioritizing the most important systems— for example, core business and safety systems—it maintains high service reliability levels.
Advanced Security
As a higher education institution, you hold a lot of sensitive data—from your intellectual property to the personal details of students, staff and visitors. This makes you a prime target for cyberattackers. We make it easy for you to segment your network to provide dedicated zones for different groups—for example, staff, students, IoT devices and visitors to events. The traffic on each is isolated, protecting your apps and data. We provide you with protection where you need it—at the edge. Verizon’s managed security services help prevent threats from reaching your internal network. And if they do, Extreme Networks can mitigate the threats.
Enable Your Smart Campus
With reliable, intelligent connectivity you can leverage technology to create a truly smart campus. You can improve student safety thanks to smart security cameras that alert you to suspicious activity. You can raise your green credentials with smart lighting that activates only under certain conditions. You can also improve on campus experiences, with wayfinding services helping new students locate their classrooms, and alerts informing them where there’s a quiet space to study.
Our intelligent network solutions make it easier for you to scale, while maintaining performance and security. By creating dedicated virtual network zones for your IoT devices, you can manage service levels and help prevent security issues from impacting your important systems.
Give Students and Employees Consistent Access
Having secure, reliable connectivity is becoming increasingly central to learning, but it’s also a key part of students’ social lives. But keeping them connected isn’t straightforward with many existing network solutions. Many use multiple SSIDs (service set identifiers), forcing staff and students to maintain multiple sets of credentials. With our solution, you can offer users a consistent mobile experience across your entire campus. They can be seamlessly switched between your Wi-Fi and 4G LTE to maintain coverage—and that will extend to 5G.
That also means your students will be able to access all the resources they need to get the most out of their course—like bandwidth-hungry augmented and virtual reality learning experiences. And, by facilitating the use of document sharing tools and video conferencing, you can improve their ability to collaborate on research projects.
Provide a Great College Sports Experience
Running college sports events is a huge undertaking, and can impact school revenue, culture, and prominence. With the right infrastructure in place, you can improve the fan experience. We have the experience to fit your stadium or arena with reliable and secure high-density Wi-Fi. With tens of thousands of fans all using their mobiles at the same time, your stadium’s cellular network can be overwhelmed. Our solutions enable that traffic to be offloaded to Wi-Fi, providing the necessary bandwidth — as well as clarity on fan online activity.
Athletic directors could offer fans new app-based services to find concessions with items they want, available restrooms, or their parking spot location, as well as videos and statistics on the game, or other games of interest. And because we can give you a single pane view of Wi-Fi usage—locations, apps/sites visited, bandwidth used—you can start making more informed content and service decisions. You can also set up network zones for guests, media, security and back-of-house, so your visitors’ access won’t inhibit network availability for more critical communications.
Why Verizon and Extreme Networks
Verizon and Extreme Networks deliver reliable and agile connections from the WAN to your end devices on your LAN. Together, we bring the power of a global IP network, decades of network security and design experience, installation and cabling knowledge, and a wireless and wired LAN fabric.
We’re helping to drive communications transformations and accelerate intelligent application deployments for university campuses, sports venues, airports and state and local government throughout the US.
But don’t just take our word for it, both Verizon and Extreme Networks have been recognized by industry analysts for our experience. According to Root Metrics®, Verizon offers reliable connectivity and has the top performing overall network in the US. Gartner has named Verizon a Leader in Network Services, globally, nine times. Extreme Networks was positioned as a Leader in Gartner’s 2018 Magic Quadrant for Wired and Wireless LAN Access Infrastructure and a Challenger in the 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Center Networking4. As of 26 September 2018, Extreme Networks has an overall rating of 4.8 out of 5 in the Data Center Networking market, and has a Service and Support Sub-Category rating of 4.7 out of 5 in the Data Center Networking market, both based on 126 ratings.