How can schools and universities ensure better learning experiences for their students?

Let’s start by explaining what smart campus actually is. In short, what we mean by this term is an interconnected, intelligent network of buildings, equipment, and devices designed to automate and optimize college or university operations. Such setup offers a wide range of benefits for campuses, including:

Networks are pivotal in enabling smart campus initiatives. In addition to supporting a range of smart building applications such as wayfinding or occupancy monitoring, a robust network infrastructure provides the bandwidth and connectivity needed to accommodate the growing number of devices and applications on campus. Furthermore, by integrating machine learning and artificial intelligence, the network can optimize campus operations, predict maintenance needs, and improve energy efficiency, ensuring a smarter and more sustainable campus environment.

However, managing numerous buildings and thousands of students across a campus can be a complex and challenging task for any university. Issues such as connectivity problems and security vulnerabilities often arise due to the vastness and intricacy of campus networks. A secure, reliable, and easy to operate network foundation, capable of handling numerous users and devices, is critical for any campus IT environment. And that’s where fabric networks come into play.

Fabric networks enable smart campus initiatives by offering a modern, scalable, and resilient architecture to connect devices, users, and applications across a campus. As IoT devices proliferate and demand for high-bandwidth applications grows, a fabric network delivers the flexibility, reliability, and performance necessary for a smart campus environment.

Grafisch Lyceum Rotterdam (GLR) is the largest and most innovative creative college for media, design and technology in Benelux. To support its complex IT environment consisting of a range of connected, multi-media equipment with different connectivity demands and security options, GLR decided to replace the legacy wired setup with a more automated and inherently secure solution to facilitate monitoring, management and provisioning. With Extreme Fabric, the school’s IT administrator can simply add client devices to the network without any manual configuration – they are automatically assigned to correct VLANs and the right access policy. Furthermore, AVB-enabled Ethernet switches that unify data, audio and video traffic on a single, standards-based network have enabled a high performing, highly available, flexible, and future-proofed solution, capable of transporting professional audio and video signals of broadcast quality.

If it wasn’t for Extreme Fabric, Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) – one of the most forward-thinking educational institutions in Europe – could have been closed entirely during the COVID-19 pandemic. Thanks to the simplification of network configurations and provisioning enabled by this solution, thousands of students, researchers, and collaborators were able to securely connect via VPN to the new network. Hypersegmentation, one other key capability of Extreme Fabric, allowed ULB to solve the problem of security stemming from the fact that all workstations had a public IP address. The university can now easily create isolated network segments that are invisible from the outside, without requiring the entire IT team to manage the cabling part of the infrastructure.

Another example of the Extreme Fabric solution dramatically raising network’s flexibility and resiliency comes from Israel. Kibbutzim College, one of the largest and most innovative education hubs in the country, needed a technology capable of providing multicast solutions that are fully integrated with unicast solutions at a high level of reliability. Today, the edge equipment that connects to the college’s network receives authorization and settings automatically and the connection is protected at the highest security levels.