Wireless

You wanted wireless; we're now bringing wireless.  Parts are coming in now for the network upgrade that's (finally!) been approved.

Our vendor of choice.  This thing's creepier than E.T.

After several options were considered, the Meraki option was selected and approved.  Meraki offers a cost-competitive solution that provides simplified management and new tools to our network team.  In particular, Meraki's monitoring and bandwidth shaping functionality stand out from the rest.  They also have a wonderful dashboard with per-device tracking and statistics.  This is useful is in figuring out how the network is being used and how we might optimize it.

For example, I might be able to tell that our heaviest users at peak are mostly on Netflix.  Netflix is a very intensive application with high bandwidth requirements.  This is why, currently, most students probably watch Netflix only late at night.  However, Netflix is also very tolerant of "lossy" connections, where some data gets lost on the way to the viewer.  The Meraki gear will allow us to prioritize internet traffic such that encrypted web traffic, which is often used for banking, online testing, and other secure services, will be prioritized above Netflix.  Why would we do this?  Because secure web traffic is *extremely* sensitive to lossy connections.  Thus, by prioritizing secure web traffic above Netflix traffic, our secure web services will be noticeably improved, while Netflix continues to work just fine.

And for those wondering, yes, we plan to implement wireless in every building on campus, as well as the Quad (thank you, Student Senate!).  The plan is to implement it this summer, and make substantial changes to how the wireless is structured.  Coming soon... separate wireless networks for students and staff!