Tianyuan College Partners with Huawei to Build a Digital and Intelligent Campus

Nestled beside the Hemu Wetland Park, the striking Hemu Campus of Tianyuan College rises along the central urban axis of Hangzhou, China. Scheduled to open in September 2025, the campus spans approximately 10.3 hectares, with a total construction area of 280,000 square meters. Designed as an integrated education complex, it aims to consolidate educational resources, optimize learning environments, and foster deep integration between education and society — serving lifelong learning needs from age 3 to 83 across the entire community.

Guided by a six-in-one (government, industry, university, research institute, finance, and user) model, Tianyuan College adopts a group-based approach to cultivate top-tier innovative talent and set a benchmark for AI-powered digital education. With goals to enhance management efficiency, accelerate digital transformation, and advance the "AI+" strategy, the school is pioneering the integration of next-generation AI and information technologies into education. It is the first project related to primary and secondary education in Hangzhou to deploy Huawei Xingmai Passive Ethernet Network (PEN) Solution. The solution provides a stable, secure, and sustainable digital foundation for efficient group-wide collaboration, innovative talent development, online-to-offline classrooms, and multi-service education complex development. Additionally, this infrastructure will serve as a key component of the future "Tianyuan Brain" digital education system.

Vision Meets Challenges

While the vision is ambitious, its implementation is not without obstacles. To realize the AI+ education blueprint envisioned by the "Tianyuan Brain," the college faced several challenges during the initial planning and construction of its campus network:

Challenges to bandwidth and performance

With the rapid adoption of smart terminals, interactive AI displays, AR/VR, AIGC-based multimodal teaching, and many other all-new applications, the number of data terminals has surged. In digital teaching scenarios, unprecedented strict requirements have been posed on the uplink bandwidth and quality of traditional school networks. During peak class hours, simultaneous downloads of videos and courseware across multiple classrooms generate massive concurrent traffic, making GE to the room insufficient and prone to network bottlenecks.

Challenges to reconstruction and deployment

The large-scale campus includes a kindergarten, primary, middle, and high schools, as well as a multi-functional Tianyuan building. The traditional three-layer network architecture is complex, with many devices and cables occupying too much space in the small extra-low voltage (ELV) room. In addition, hole drilling on the wall and slow construction process pose great challenges to network reconstruction and expansion.

Challenges to O&M and green development

Numerous active network devices increase daily maintenance workloads and fault detection complexity, while also hindering energy consumption and heat dissipation, even causing potential fire hazards. For Tianyuan College, which prioritizes sustainable education, reducing energy use and extending network lifecycle became urgent needs.

Huawei Xingmai PEN, Way to Simplicity

10G to the room: high bandwidth for smart classes

To ensure high bandwidth in smart teaching scenarios, Huawei Xingmai PEN offers 10GE to the room, enabling high-speed wired access in classrooms, thereby fully unleashing the potential of Wi-Fi 7. With this, whether it is downloading teaching videos in multiple classrooms at the same time or performing large-scale application-based interaction in classrooms, the network can remain stable and smooth. This avoids frame freezing and latency caused by bottlenecks of the GE network, ensuring immersive smart classroom experience.

Configuration-free RUs: simplified deployment against complex reconstruction

Given the large scale and multi-building layout of the campus, Huawei Xingmai PEN is introduced to replace active access-layer devices with passive remote units (RUs) that require no configuration or maintenance. In this way, only optical fibers need to be deployed in classrooms for fast access. This avoids complex construction caused by massive cabling, space occupation in the ELV room, and hole drilling on the wall related to the traditional three-layer network architecture. Even in concurrent construction scenarios across primary, middle, and high schools, as well as the international center, rapid delivery and flexible expansion of the network can be easily achieved.

Passive aggregation architecture, building a green network supporting sustainable development

The RUs of Huawei Xingmai PEN do not require power supply or fans for heat dissipation, and have extremely low power consumption. Furthermore, the passive aggregation architecture effectively reduces the number of ELV rooms, slashing the footprint and power consumption of devices. For Tianyuan College, this not only simplifies daily O&M, but also lowers fire risks, supporting smart education while embracing green and low-carbon development.

On the new journey to digital education, the in-depth cooperation between Tianyuan College and Huawei is more than just technology convergence, it is also a joint exploration of the AI+ education model. Together, they will focus on digital infrastructure, AI applications, and green campus innovation. Powered by Huawei Xingmai PEN, the campus can easily support service concurrency in multiple scenarios and deliver educational resources on demand, ultimately building a replicable digital education benchmark based on "Tianyuan Brain" together. Looking ahead, Tianyuan College and Huawei will continue to explore new models of digital education, deepen efforts in group-based schooling and talent cultivation, and set a benchmark for next-generation smart campuses, thereby empowering education transformation through innovative connectivity.