Bahçeşehir University in Türkiye Joins Forces with Huawei to Build a High-Quality 10 Gbps Campus

Bahçeşehir University (BAU), the largest private education group in Türkiye, has 7 university campuses, 125 Bahçeşehir colleges, and 137 Uğur schools. Its main campus is located along the shores of the Bosphorus Strait, enjoying picturesque views and boasting the most dynamic hustle and bustle lifestyles in Türkiye.

BAU aspires to enhance its influence in the academia and among global partners, further transform digital campus experiences, and provide a best-in-class growth platform for teachers and students. To this end, BAU has long been investing in and innovating information technologies for leading-edge ICT rollouts.

In Need of Network Transformation to Keep Up with Education Network Upgrade

In recent years, BAU has expanded in scale and witnessed a steady increase of teachers and students. Despite this, BAU stays committed to providing more premium services for teachers and students and striding towards a new future of digitalization and internationalization. This necessitates the urgent need to build a high-quality campus network. Especially network performance, network security assurance, and operations and maintenance (O&M) experience are key considerations, as education networks are upgrading to next-generation, intelligent ones.

• Diversified wireless teaching requires higher bandwidth.

Nowadays, network and information technologies are widely used in teaching scenarios. In particular, going wireless provides students with more flexible learning methods, such as online HD video teaching, centralized exams, large-scale campus lectures, and mobile office in labs. However, the original wireless networks in academic buildings, office areas, auditoriums, and large-scale conference areas have coverage blind spots, and suffer from frequent network congestions. This severely affects teaching and office efficiency, and causes complaints from teachers and students.

• Network security needs to be enhanced to prevent data leakage.

BAU attaches great importance to scientific research. At its labs, there are a large amount of non-public scientific research data. That's why BAU places stringent demands for network security to prevent information leakage and ensure data security for teachers and students. As such, a challenge for BAU along their pursuit of a high-quality campus network is to ensure data security while building a comprehensive campus security protection network.

• O&M methods need to be optimized as the campus scale expands.

As the campus network scale expands, legacy network O&M approaches become inadequate, failing to support campus network upgrade. This complicates network fault demarcation and locating, prolongs troubleshooting, and compromises teachers' and students' satisfaction with wireless application experience. To change this, BAU urgently needs to improve network O&M efficiency and ensure uncompromised user experience during its efforts to build an intelligent campus network.

Choosing Huawei Xinghe Intelligent Campus Solution to Build a High-Quality 10 Gbps Campus and Set a Smart Campus Benchmark

After fully considering all factors, BAU decided to choose Huawei's Xinghe Intelligent Campus Solution to build a high-quality 10 Gbps campus network with high speeds, intelligent operations, and easy O&M.

The solution stands out with compelling features, such as:

• High performance for always-smooth online teaching experience

BAU is quickly integrating network and information technologies into daily teaching for more innovative teaching paradigms and higher teaching efficiency. Huawei Wi-Fi 7 can help in this case. By leveraging innovative features, such as multi-link operation (MLO) and 4096-QAM, Wi-Fi 7 offers 4 times higher wireless data rate than Wi-Fi 6.

Real-world test results show that Huawei's Wi-Fi 7 AP offers a single-client speed of up to 4.5 Gbps. This means even in high-density user scenarios, hundreds of Mbps bandwidth is still assured, easily underpinning various bandwidth-hungry education services. This also lays a solid network foundation for teaching, scientific research, and daily office work.

To achieve full wireless coverage without blind spots, BAU has deployed a brand-new Wi-Fi 7 network in all key places such as academic buildings, office buildings, conference rooms, labs, auditoriums, and underground car park. In this way, teachers and students can access the ultra-fast Wi-Fi 7 network anytime and anywhere, enjoying seamless roaming experience during online HD teaching, live streaming of large-scale activities, and other use cases.

• Accelerated network security deployment for end-to-end data security protection

To ensure scientific research data security, BAU has built a comprehensive end-to-end network security system with Huawei. Beyond this, BAU is actively preparing for next-step strategic security deployment — that is, introducing Huawei's innovative Wi-Fi Shield technology to ensure data security from the outset.

By enabling the AP to send extra interference signals, Wi-Fi Shield ensures that only the target user can accurately receive data packets so that malicious users (non-target users) cannot eavesdrop any valid wireless data packets. This marks a shift from hard-to-eavesdrop to impossible-to-eavesdrop and prevents leakage of key data.

• One-click fault root cause locating for always-assured user experience

New O&M challenges arise along with the expanding campus network scale and network infrastructure upgrade, such as difficult fault locating and long troubleshooting time. To address these challenges, BAU's technical team has performed thorough tests and decided to deploy Huawei's intelligent campus O&M platform iMaster NCE in the near future.

Specifically, the unique network digital map function of iMaster NCE can manage network-wide devices, users, and applications on one map. Powered by AI algorithms, iMaster NCE can proactively identify legacy network issues and provide feasible rectification suggestions accordingly, helping O&M staff demarcate and locate faults in minutes and optimize network resources in seconds upon a terminal device fault. More importantly, this efficiently ensures teaching application experience of teachers and students, and improves their satisfaction with the campus network.

Gearing Up for a New Future for Smart Education and Unlocking a New Chapter for Intelligent Education Network Rollouts

Huawei and BAU have collaborated to build a high-quality 10 Gbps campus with Wi-Fi 7 and construct an intelligent campus network. During this process, they have also reached an in-depth consensus on the future development of smart education.

BAU's cooperation with Huawei aims to deliver a speedy, premium, and secure intelligent network experience, in turn improving the university's international influence and creating a high-quality teaching environment. This aligns with what Huawei has long been pursuing in the smart education sector.

Looking ahead, Huawei will continue to promote the intelligent upgrade of the education industry. The successful cooperation between BAU and Huawei sets a good example for other like-minded universities and institutions, and injects new vitality and momentum into the transformation and upgrade of the entire education industry.