Wireless at Work

For the first time, U.S. businesses are projected to spend more on wireless services this year than on traditional wireline, according to an industry report from In-Stat, a technology market research firm in Arizona. That means the wireless revolution that’s been touted for the past decade is becoming reality, as companies see cost savings and other efficiency enhancements to be gained by cutting the cord.

But how are those figures translating to the everyday business of doing business? We asked four Minnesota organizations how going wireless has made their lives easier.

Back to School

Boasting a campus with more than 50 buildings spread across 244 acres, the University of Minnesota–Duluth (UMD) was a surprise wireless pioneer, starting its Wi-Fi deployment more than four years ago. The network grew quickly, and now contains more than 180 wireless access points, with significant additional growth planned. But with a staff that already had plenty to do, the school had to look for ways to run it more efficiently.

“We have a team of three people in the networking group,” says Josh Richard, a network administrator at UMD. “That’s not a lot of people to manage a network that serves a community of 10,000. For us, tools that improve efficiency are an absolute requirement.”

To do the job, the networking team picked California-based AirWave’s Wireless Management Suite software to support wireless access points and controllers from Cisco. The Duluth campus has approximately 50 legacy 350-series and 1120-series Cisco Aironet access points that do not have sufficient memory to convert to lightweight access-point protocol. Eventually, those access points will be replaced, but the AirWave software will enable them to be managed efficiently during the transition.

With the AirWave Management Platform (AMP), the IT staff has full visibility down to each individual user and device, and they can see how the network is performing. When a user calls with a problem, the networking team can identify where the user is connected and view a detailed user history to see whether the user has successfully connected from that location in the past.

In addition to the near real-time user monitoring, AirWave provides usage and performance reports that the university needs to accurately plan the future growth of its wireless network.

“With AMP, the IT staff was able to determine that wireless access points in the medical-school classrooms were consistently overloaded, sometimes with 80 or more users connected to a single wireless [access point],” Richard says. “With AMP’s reports, the networking team was able to identify the problem and add new wireless access points while the medical students were on vacation.”

While AirWave’s Wireless Management Suite has the horsepower to manage the wireless needs of UMD’s student body, it’s typically employed by much smaller corporate networks serving dozens of users instead of thousands.