The Ministry of Science and Education of Azerbaijan Partners with Huawei to Build Future-Ready Education Campus Networks

At the crossroads of Europe and Asia, Azerbaijan is renowned worldwide as the "Land of Fire" for the naturally occurring fires that burn continuously on the Absheron Peninsula.

Nearby, in the capital city of Baku, the Old City is steeped in a thousand years of history and is recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage site, while the soaring Flame Towers proudly reflect the nation's spirit. Furthermore, time-honored carpet weaving and Azerbaijani Mugham have been inscribed on UNESCO's List of Intangible Cultural Heritage. The poetry of Nizami puts into words a profound cultural legacy, while pomegranates and tea culture infuse this sense of history into everyday life.

When ancient civilization meets the wave of digitalization, education becomes the "spark" that lights up the future. In 2022, Azerbaijan restructured its former Ministry of Education into the Ministry of Science and Education. This move aimed to bring together research and education, promote educational fairness, and enhance educational quality through digital transformation. Facing the new challenge of smart education, how will this ancient "Land of Fire" shine with renewed brilliance?

Core Requirements for Building Future-Proof Education Infrastructure Networks

For the Ministry of Science and Education of Azerbaijan ("the Ministry"), a top priority is to promote equitable and inclusive education and to narrow the gap between urban and rural educational resources. For this reason, the Ministry remains committed to giving every primary and secondary school teacher and student—whether in bustling cities or remote villages—equal access to high-quality digital resources such as interactive online classrooms and remote teaching. By doing so, the Ministry delivers on its promise of educational fairness.

With its educational mission in mind, the Ministry urgently needed to build a future-ready educational campus network featuring wide coverage, high efficiency, and strong stability. Once established, this infrastructure would accelerate digital transformation in education, enhance overall education quality, and drive the strategic integration of research and education.

Another critical priority was data localization and compliance. To address this, the Ministry sought a locally deployed, independently controlled network management solution to ensure that education data stayed within the country and met strict regulatory requirements. It also planned to introduce cutting-edge Wi-Fi 7 technologies to build superfast, stable teaching and office networks. By adopting intelligent operations and maintenance (O&M) models, the Ministry aimed to achieve centralized visualization and automated batch management across the entire network. The goal was to dramatically reduce O&M complexity and slash operating costs in the long run, while enabling the unified deployment, rapid upgrade, and stable operations of campus networks across more than 4,500 schools nationwide.

To sum up, the Ministry urgently needed to upgrade its network infrastructure. By introducing industry-leading equipment and technical support, it strived to provide a solid foundation for teachers and students, fully meeting the demands of high-quality digital education development.

Selecting Huawei's Xinghe AI High-Quality 10 Gbps Campus Network Solution to Reimagine Digital and Intelligent Education

After a meticulous selection process, the Ministry ultimately chose Huawei's Xinghe AI High-Quality 10 Gbps Campus Network Solution to fulfill its critical requirements. With Huawei's solution, robust wired infrastructure ensures stability for campus networks, while wireless connectivity brings digital classrooms to life.

The solution is built on the integrated wired and wireless product portfolio of the CloudEngine S5735-L8P4X-QA-V2 switch and AirEngine 5773-21 Wi-Fi 7 AP. It delivers the following standout advantages:

• Flexible and reliable wired access with silent, energy-efficient design: The S5735-L8P4X-QA-V2 access switch comes with eight GE PoE+ downlink ports to support diverse terminals in classrooms and offices, simplifying campus cabling while meeting PoE requirements. Its four 10GE uplink optical ports overcome legacy 100 Mbps and 1,000 Mbps bandwidth bottlenecks, ensuring stable performance for high-concurrency, heavy-traffic scenarios such as remote teaching, large downloads of cloud resources, and campus-wide video backhaul. With a fanless natural cooling design, the switch operates noiselessly, making it ideal for noise-sensitive environments such as classrooms, reading rooms, and laboratories, with no disruption to the learning focus and attentiveness of teachers and students.

• Seamless and high-performance wireless experience: The AirEngine 5773-21 Wi-Fi 7 AP provides services concurrently on 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands, enabling lag-free HD live streaming, remote teaching, and collaborative research with ultra-low latency. Its built-in smart antennas deliver full wireless coverage without blind spots, so that teachers and students alike benefit from strong, stable signals during mobile teaching and office activities. This guarantees efficient teaching and learning at all times.

Powered by Huawei's solution, localized compliance ensures data security without cross-border transfer risks, while intelligent and simplified O&M increases efficiency. The Ministry deployed Huawei's iMaster NCE-Campus on-premises, with all platform components and data hosted 100% in local data centers. This eliminates cross-border Internet dependencies, fundamentally avoids cross-border data transfer risks at the source, and fully aligns with education data localization requirements. Particularly, iMaster NCE-Campus provides a digital map for unified visualization of applications, users, terminals, and networks, significantly lowering O&M complexity. With only a small number of personnel, thousands of campuses nationwide can be centrally managed. On top of that, template-based batch management enables device onboarding and configuration changes within minutes, reducing O&M costs by up to 70%. In addition, iMaster NCE-Campus enables unified access authentication and fine-grained permission control across the entire network. It also strengthens network security and resilience, ensuring stable teaching services and education data security.

Together for a Shared Future, Co-Creating a New Digital Intelligent Education Ecosystem

Amid the wave of the digital era, Azerbaijan is accelerating education digitalization to enhance educational quality and efficiency, achieve equitable and inclusive development, and strengthen its talent foundation. The successful delivery of this project marks a significant development in the collaboration between the Ministry of Science and Education of Azerbaijan and Huawei in the education sector. It not only promotes Azerbaijan's education digitalization strategy, but also underscores Huawei's commitment to empowering the inclusive global education through digital technologies. Looking ahead, both parties will harness the Xinghe AI High-Quality 10 Gbps Campus Network Solution as a bridge to deepen multi-dimensional cooperation and fast-track the development of Azerbaijan's education sector.