Huawei Wireless Coverage & e-Classrooms Solution Enables Indonesia UNNES University Teaching Innovation

Semarang State University (UNNES) is a national university organized by the Ministry of Research, Technology and Higher Education of the Republic of Indonesia, which offers a wide variety of disciplines, technology, sports, arts, and cultural courses. UNNES has eight (8) faculties, two (2) institutes, and five (5) centres of excellence which offer 64 undergraduate degrees, 22 master’s degrees and 5 doctoral degrees with approximately 31,000 students.

Semarang State University (UNNES) is a conservation university. UNNES's vision is to becoming a conservation university with international recognition.

Currently, the "communication technology transformation" of the university is ongoing. User access to campus networks with unified authentication and centralized network management are very crucial, especially ubiquitous wireless coverage for campus is the key to achieve teaching innovation through wireless coverage and e-classrooms[L(1] 

Key Challenges

With the rapid development of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), the human society has entered the unprecedented information era. The education and teaching cannot be separated from information technology. UNNES understand the digital transformation in education is the new normal and conclude that the transformation of education services is urgent after asses the current network and compare with the international trend. The network bandwidth, network robustness, and O&M efficiency need to be improved to support the increasingly of the complex network requirements brought by the rapid development of campus. Hence, the campus’s top management have also formulated a plan for online education services, which can only be achieved with the support of high-performance ICT infrastructure. Based on the requirements and planning, the university shall expand the network bandwidth to 10 Gbit/s to meet the requirements of high-bandwidth services.

Huawei Solution

1.   High-bandwidth, full-coverage wireless network, facilitating connectivity for entire university

After the high-bandwidth expansion is completed, it is another major challenge for campus administrators to ensure that every user (teachers and students) can enjoy uninterrupted high-quality network connections at any time and any place. In addition, teachers and students need to use various teaching software, tools, and remote conferencing applications, which require high stability and reliability. While high requirements of the network and terminal devices is necessary, high-performance and stable switches are required to support the network. Network usage varies between different learning application scenarios. For example, Teaching scenarios that require large bandwidth, such as AR/VR virtual teaching, online and offline remote teaching, and cross-campus network management, a complex and stable network is required to support all these services. So it’s necessary to control traffic volume, quantities of interfaces of the switch and the restrictions on access ports after stacking are met. With Huawei high-speed switch to upgrade the intranet bandwidth, and uses the latest Wifi6 technology to improve wireless coverage and ratio. Constructed a full-coverage network especially the location of the AP, such as classrooms, dormitories, lecture halls, and playgrounds.

2.   Innovative Teaching to Promote Education equity and equality

At present, remote training systems, remote interactive classrooms, and online learning systems provide teachers in different regions with the opportunity to receive remote training from national excellent teachers. The experience and skills of excellent teachers are imparted through remote meeting systems, remote learning observation, online video self-learning, and other means. To alleviate the shortage of teachers in different regions and improve the teaching level in different regions, on the other hand, it can effectively improve teachers' ICT skills and facilitate the sharing of experience and skills. Meanwhile, UNNES is actively exploring a path to digital education transformation. Currently, a remote video conference system has been setup. Once the digital classrooms such as remote online learning platforms and remote interactive classrooms are built in the future, users can share learning resources anytime and anywhere and enjoy equal opportunities for education as long as the network is accessible. Huawei's Cloudlink board can serve as an entry to improve education equity and equality to a new stage and open a new chapter in the digital education of UNNES in Indonesia.

3.   Intelligent O&M Management Helps Digital Transformation

To meet the requirements of UNNES in education informatization, Huawei proposed a smart campus solution that meets the requirements of the current stage. It uses digital technologies to transform traditional education into smart education.

   For information center of the university, how to quickly deploy, simplify O&M, shorten the O&M duration, and shorten the troubleshooting time is a complex task. Data center networks are complex, and various ICT infrastructures involve a lot of energy consumption costs. For example, the design of air ducts for data center cabinets, complete isolation of cold and hot air ducts, and heat dissipation efficiency require more professional products for data center equipment room design. From the beginning, Huawei launched the smart campus network solution with unified intelligent management based on the customer's live network conditions and actual requirements. The Cloud Engine series switches are selected to meet service requirements and can achieve future network evolution especially to ensure the full wireless network coverage of the entire campus network. In network management monitoring, Huawei Agile Controller can control and manage user policies more easily. Users can be grouped based on priorities and bandwidth requirements, regardless of user locations, thus able to implement intelligent network management.

Customer Benefits

In summary, Huawei's solution solves the campus’s actual problems. It enables real-time multimedia remote interaction between different campuses and classrooms, and allows students in different areas to enjoy remote course resources. Through mobile clients, students and teachers can access the remote education platform anytime and anywhere through the campus network. The university can use Huawei's smart screen to implement synchronous learning and content development, which can benefit more users.

Customer expressed that Huawei's products and solutions help them to support digital transformation and accelerate the transformation of teaching informatization in higher education, this is aligned with their customer-centric requirement.