The Road to Intelligent Education Networks: The University of Hong Kong Partners with Huawei to Build a Wi-Fi 7 High-Quality Smart Campus

The University of Hong Kong (HKU), Asia's Global University, delivers impact through internationalization, innovation, and interdisciplinarity. According to QS World University Rankings 2024, HKU was ranked No. 17 worldwide and No. 2 in Asia, topping the list among the eight major universities in Hong Kong.

HKU has been committed to creating opportunities for the best academic talent. To this end, the university aspires to develop a collegial, flexible, pluralistic and supportive intellectual environment and provide a safe, healthy and sustainable workplace to support and advance teaching, learning and research.

Furthermore, HKU strives to enhance collaboration with academia and global partners, optimize the digital experience on campus, and provide a best-in-class growth platform for teachers and students. To meet this, HKU has been investing heavily into and innovating information technologies as well as pursuing leading-edge Information and Communications Technology (ICT) deployments.

An advanced ICT solution is crucial for HKU to improve teaching outcomes, optimize student experience, enhance research capabilities, maintain top-ranked ICT adoption, and stride towards the world-class level. The key to the ICT solution is a robust network infrastructure featuring high bandwidth, superior experience, and simplified Operations and Maintenance (O&M).

Strong Demand for Education Network Upgrade

HKU, one of top-ranked higher education institutions in Asia, maintains a high international reputation and sees a growing number of teachers and students in recent years. In order to better provide quality services to teachers and students and move towards the digital and international future, HKU found it a must to construct a high-quality education network on campus. This meant intelligent upgrade to the next-generation education network. To make this happen, HKU needed to address challenges in network performance, security, and experience.

• Insufficient network performance increased the risk of traffic congestion.

Network information technologies are being widely used in education scenarios. In particular, the adoption of online education provides students with more flexible learning methods. In scenarios such as centralized exams and large-scale lectures, online exam submission and attendance are common practices. However, insufficient network performance caused frequent network traffic congestion. This reduced teaching efficiency while affecting teaching experience and evaluation.

• There was a strong demand for preventing data leakage and strengthening network security protection.

As one of the top universities with unmatched research capabilities, HKU has a large volume of critical research data that needs to be strongly protected. To avoid information leakage and ensure data security for teachers and students, HKU placed very demanding requirements on network security and reliability. A key challenge faced with HKU was to ensure data security and build a campus-wide comprehensive security protection network as part of a high-quality education network.

• Faults were difficult to demarcate and locate, degrading application experience.

As the campus network scale expands, conventional network O&M approaches became inefficient and unable to support campus network upgrade. This led to more complicated network fault demarcation and locating, prolonged troubleshooting, and degraded teaching experience and satisfaction of teachers and students. To change this, HKU found it essential to improve network quality, increase network O&M efficiency, and ensure user experience during the construction of intelligent campus networks.

In response to these challenges and upgrade requirements, HKU chose Huawei as a trusted partner and provider of integrated solutions. Specifically, Huawei offered the Wi-Fi 7-based high-quality 10 Gbps campus network solution to HKU, comprehensively upgrading network device performance, security, and O&M and aligning with the requirements for high-quality education network construction.

Building a Wi-Fi 7-based High-Quality 10 Gbps Campus Network as a New Benchmark for Education Network Construction

The Huawei's Wi-Fi 7-based high-quality 10 Gbps campus network solution fully meets HKU's ICT needs by offering unique features like wireless experience upgrade, application experience upgrade, and O&M experience upgrade. With this solution, the two sides successfully reached cooperation consensus on jointly building a world-leading intelligent education network.

• High network speeds ensure an always-smooth online teaching experience.

HKU is accelerating the integration of network information technologies into daily teaching activities in order to innovate teaching paradigms and increase teaching efficiency. A typical example is online exam submission, where Huawei's Wi-Fi 7-based high-quality 10 Gbps campus network solution can help.

Specifically, Huawei Wi-Fi 7 APs, integral to this solution, come with innovative dynamic-zoom smart antennas to double the signal strength for terminals at the original locations, thereby accelerating online exam submission. Powered by Multi-Link Operation (MLO) and Stimulated Brillouin Scattering (SBS)-based filtering technologies, Huawei's Wi-Fi 7 delivers four times higher speeds than Wi-Fi 6, with the measured rate for a single terminal reaching record-high 4.3 Gbps. This guarantees hundreds of Mbps bandwidth even in high-density scenarios. Benefiting from such high bandwidth, many students can simultaneously submit their exam answers online, without suffering from delays or failures in exam submission any more.

The Loke Yew Hall is an important place at HKU to hold ceremonies, seminars, classes, and exams. By deploying Huawei Wi-Fi 7 APs, HKU efficiently accommodates high user concurrency in this historical building. In particular, the joint scheduling algorithm enables Huawei Wi-Fi 7 APs to schedule resources based on the time domain, frequency domain, and spatial domain. The result is that a single AP supports 120 concurrent channels of 1080p HD video while improving the overall concurrency performance by 50%. This offers strong network performance for online classes, live lectures, and other bandwidth-hungry activities.

• Accelerated network security deployments ensure end-to-end data security.

Nowadays, cyber-attacks are more rampant than ever. To ensure the security of research data, HKU chose Huawei's end-to-end network security solution. Currently, HKU is planning the next phase of deployment for Wi-Fi 7 Shield technology at scale to radically ensure wireless security. This unique technology works as follows: When a terminal accesses a Wi-Fi network, the AP leverages Huawei's patented Wi-Fi Shield engine to send additional interference signals as noise based on the user location information. And noise is 0 only at the location of the target terminal. In this way, malicious users cannot eavesdrop any valid data.

In the future, HKU will deploy Huawei's multi-layer ransomware protection solution to accelerate the deployment of network-storage collaboration and endpoint security, further protecting research data assets.

• One-click locating of fault root causes ensures uncompromised user experience.

As the network scale expands and networks are upgraded to intelligent ones, issues such as difficult fault locating and time-consuming troubleshooting need to be urgently addressed. In response, HKU will introduce the network digital map feature of Huawei's iMaster NCE, after tested by NetOps team.

The network digital map clearly displays the real-time experience of Network Elements (NEs), users, terminals, and applications. It equips campus network O&M personnel with an all-scenario converged management platform, thereby demarcating and locating faults in minutes and completing optimization in seconds upon faults. All of these deliver superior teaching application experience for teachers and students, and improve their satisfaction with daily network experience.

Embracing the Future of Smart Education and Ushering in a New Era of Intelligent Education Network Construction

HKU has partnered with Huawei to build a high-quality 10 Gbps campus network based on Wi-Fi 7, marking a step forward towards an intelligent education network. In this process, the two parties have reached more consensus on the development of smart education. Most importantly, this partnership has given more implications for the future development of smart education.

"We are continuing to stride towards the most advanced technologies to transform HKU into the world's top-ranked higher education institution. Huawei's Wi-Fi 7-based high-quality 10 Gbps campus network solution helps us improve network performance, ensure the daily teaching experience of teachers and students, and upgrade our education network to an intelligent one. This takes us closer to the future blueprint of smart education." — Flora Ng, CIO and University Librarian of HKU