New ICT Promotes New Zealand’s Higher Education

Founded in 1878, Lincoln University is highly regarded as New Zealand’s “specialist land-based university.” It is the first university in the Southern Hemisphere to offer agriculture programs and landscape architecture majors, and is ranked as one of the world’s five-star universities by the QS Stars University Rankings.

Lincoln University’s motto: “Feed the world. Protect the future. Live well.”

Challenges

Lincoln University has a large campus, but had not upgraded its network since 2004. As a result, the university faced problems from aging devices, a non-scalable network, and insufficient bandwidth for both wired and wireless networks. Moreover,  many of the wooden buildings caused severe signal interference.

Wired and wireless devices were deployed separately in Lincoln University’s legacy network. The devices used the 802.11b standard and delivered only 11 Mbit/s of bandwidth that slowed the wireless network.

Independent Access Controllers (ACs) created wireless traffic bottlenecks that required significant amounts of maintenance and troubleshooting time by network administrators and technicians.

The complexity of network policies led to inefficient Operations and Maintenance (O&M), and poor wireless network coverage caused mutual interference.

All these issues interfered with the university’s educational modernization. As a result, the university needed an advanced campus network to better serve teachers and students.

Solution

The university decided to invest in advanced ICT technologies such as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), cloud computing, and big data. After careful evaluation and a comparison of several vendors, the university chose Huawei’s Agile Education Campus Network Solution for its high bandwidth, reliability, and simple O&M.

High Reliability

Network reliability is vital to online teaching, mobile education, and high-definition video services. Further, reliability at the core layer is a top priority because core switches perform wired and wireless user authentication and policy control. The Huawei S12700 series of high-capacity core switches is built specifically to support next-generation campus networks. Delivering 4 μs inter-chassis transmission latency — the lowest in the industry — to smooth traffic transmission, the S12700 employs Huawei-proprietary Cluster Switch System Generation2 (CSS2) and 1+N Main Processing Unit (MPU) backup technologies for improved reliability.

Virtualizing Campus Network into One Device

Huawei S12700 comes pre-integrated with native Access Controllers (ACs) that use Huawei’s programmable Ethernet Network Processor (ENP) to enable AC functions. The S12700 provides unified wired and wireless traffic forwarding, service management, and user authentication. More importantly, the S12700 eliminates bottlenecks and simplifies device management by sharing wired and wireless bandwidth resources to centrally control network traffic — essentially virtualizing the entire campus network into one logical device.

Huawei’s campus network solution also capitalizes on its Super Virtual Fabric (SVF) technology which creates the following advantages:

Contributes to effective network management by enabling administrators to easily locate and rectify faults.

Is a vertical virtualization technology enabling cost-effective, fixed-configuration switches to act as remote interface cards for a parent switch.

Turns Access Points (APs) into “super devices” by increasing the port density of the parent switch and facilitating centralized switch management.

Consistent Service Experience

Huawei’s campus network solution is particularly focused on mobile network availability. Huawei helped Lincoln University deploy an optimized Wi-Fi solution for classrooms, lecture halls, offices, dormitories, and outside areas that has improved wireless coverage to 95 percent or higher.

Lincoln University users were concerned if their access rights and experiences would be consistent whether they were working or studying. Huawei’s solution applies centralized authentication architecture on the basis of collaboration between the Agile Switch and Agile Controller. So no matter where teachers and students are, Huawei’s solution provides them with a consistent, high-quality experience regardless of location or device.

Benefits

Huawei created an agile campus for Lincoln University by constructing a highly reliable network that provides sufficient bandwidth, easy O&M, and complete coverage. This enables students to learn anywhere, anytime.

Wired access bandwidth increased by ten times.

Wireless access bandwidth increased by one hundred times.

10G aggregation and 40G core layers accommodate bandwidth-intensive services such as scientific research and multimedia-based teaching.

Network O&M efficiency improved by up to 95 percent through user role-based, refined access control, and graphical management.

With increased usage of the mobile Internet, Huawei helps universities like Lincoln to utilize a variety of applications such as the education cloud, online teaching, and education via mobile videos.

About Huawei Enterprise Business Group

Huawei Enterprise Business Group (“Huawei Enterprise”) is one of the four business groups at Huawei, a leading global Information and Communications Technology (ICT) solutions provider. Leveraging Huawei’s strong R&D capabilities and comprehensive technical expertise, Huawei Enterprise provides a wide range of highly efficient customer-centric ICT solutions and services to global vertical industry and enterprise customers across government and public sector, finance, transportation, electric power, energy, commercial businesses, and ISPs. Huawei Enterprise’s innovative and leading solutions cover network infrastructure, Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C), cloud computing and data centers, enterprise information security, and industry application solutions.

About Lincoln University

Founded in 1878, Lincoln University in Christchurch, New Zealand, is the third-oldest university in the country. Moreover, Lincoln University combines the advantages of traditional and emerging industries. It is regarded as one of the world’s 5-star universities, according to the QS Stars University Rankings. Lincoln University is the first university in the Southern Hemisphere to offer agriculture programs and landscape architecture majors.