McGill University has deployed Aruba’s adaptive wireless LANs across its two Montreal campuses. The university has deployed over 2,700 out of a total of 3,700 Aruba wireless access points, which makes it among the largest university wireless networks in Canada.

 

McGill University’s IT Director, Gary Bernstein explained in a statement that to work reliably in an educational institution a wireless LAN must be highly adaptable, massively scalable, and secure in the extreme.

 

Faculty and students each see the wireless network as an indispensable tool on a daily basis, and network outages are just not acceptable in this environment. Before selecting Aruba for this application, McGill conducted an exhaustive technical evaluation and field trial, and are very pleased with both the speed of deployment and the solid performance of the installed network.

 

Fran Sanda, Aruba’s manager for Canadian sales said in a statement that universities are challenging environments for wireless networks because of the size of their campuses, the large number of simultaneous users, the dynamic nature of network usage, and the security challenge posed by tens of thousands of unsecured laptops.

 

Sanda added that in addition to the robustness and adaptability of their wireless LAN, the ease-of-use of its centralized network management architecture, and the strength of its security features, they believe ARM (News - Alert) played a central role in delivering the solid performance McGill University and its users have experienced.

 

Aruba’s adaptive radio management (ARM) technology delivers follow-me connectivity. This is achieved by automating common network set-up, survey, and maintenance tasks, and then continuously optimizing network performance to support data, toll-quality voice, and streaming video applications.

 

McGill University is one of the largest universities in the province of Quebec, with more than 33,000 students and 1,570 faculty and staff members. Including McGill University, Aruba networks now serve more than 250,000 students in Canada at universities from coast-to-coast. Recently, the company’s adaptive wireless LAN and AirWave (News - Alert) Wireless Management Suite was picked by the University of Wyoming for deployment at its Laramie campus.