Huawei's Wi-Fi 7 Solution Empowered UPV's Digital Transformation

A Prestigious University at a Digital Crossroads

Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) stands as a prestigious public university and a leading institution in Spanish technical higher education. It holds the distinction of being the highest-ranked Spanish technical university in the highly regarded Shanghai Ranking, a position that underscores its commitment to academic excellence and innovation. For over five decades, UPV has been at the forefront of training professionals for a dynamic future, a mission inherently dependent on robust and advanced digital infrastructure.

The university's main campus in Valencia is a hub of academic activity, housing approximately 35,000 students and faculty across thirteen schools and twenty-three research centers. This dense ecosystem of learning, research, and administration demands a network that is not merely a utility but a critical enabler for cutting-edge education, seamless collaboration, and daily campus life. A future-ready digital foundation is essential for maintaining its competitive edge and fulfilling its educational promise.

As one of Europe’s leading technical universities, ranked in the top 25 of Europe, the UPV has continuously expanded its international collaborations in recent years. This includes deep academic and research partnerships with world-class institutions such as China’s Beihang University, with joint initiatives like the Hangzhou campus project. To support its ambitions in globalized education and digital transformation, UPV required a high-performance, future-ready campus network infrastructure.

After evaluating multiple technology providers, UPV chose to collaborate with Huawei to deploy a new generation Wi-Fi solution. As a global leader in the ICT industry, Huawei brings extensive experience in education digitalization, Wi-Fi technology innovation, and large-scale campus network construction. Huawei has also worked closely with leading universities in China, including Beihang University, for many years.

This project not only establishes a strong digital foundation for UPV’s campus development, but also further strengthens the emerging collaborative ecosystem among UPV, Beihang University, and Huawei in international education and technological innovation.

The Wi-Fi initiative is only the beginning of the partnership between UPV and Huawei. In the future, both parties will continue exploring additional forms of cooperation such as AI-related course development, deployment of smart classroom technologies like the IdeaHub, and digital skills training—jointly paving the way for a more advanced and future-oriented digital education environment.

Major Challenges: Evolving Needs Outpacing Existing Network Capabilities

As a leading institution committed to innovation, UPV's digital requirements continuously evolved. The campus network, initially deployed in 2015 with Wi-Fi 4/5 technology, began to encounter limitations in supporting the university's next-generation academic and operational ambitions. While reliably serving the campus for years, the gap between its capabilities and the demands of modern, high-bandwidth applications became increasingly apparent, presenting challenges in several key areas:

• Inadequate User Experience and Coverage: The legacy Wi-Fi 4/5 equipment struggled with high-density connectivity in lecture halls, libraries, and student residences, leading to slow connections, instability, and frequent drop-offs during peak hours. Consistent coverage was also an issue, with dead zones in peripheral areas like corridor ends and underground laboratories disrupting mobile learning and video conferences.

• Limitations on Supporting Future Academic and Research Innovation: The university's vision for next-generation teaching and research anticipates the adoption of data-intensive applications. Tools such as virtual simulation labs, high-resolution video streaming for lectures, and the transfer of large-scale research datasets would place unprecedented demands on network bandwidth and latency. The existing Wi-Fi 4/5 infrastructure's limited single-user throughput and higher latency could become a constraint, potentially hindering the smooth adoption of such innovative methods and slowing down collaborative research workflows that depend on real-time data exchange.

• Inefficient Operations and Management: The network's operational model was costly and reactive. Outdated devices consumed excessive energy, and troubleshooting was time-consuming due to a lack of centralized visibility. The closed, monolithic architecture meant any future upgrade would require a costly and disruptive "rip-and-replace" approach, depriving the university of a more sustainable, evolutionary path for its IT investment.

These issues collectively formed a crucial impediment. The network, intended to be an invisible facilitator, had instead become a visible constraint on productivity, innovation, and the overall campus experience.

Strategic Collaboration and Solution: Implementing a Forward-Looking Network Evolution

In response to these challenges, UPV partnered with Huawei to execute a strategic network modernization. The objective was clear: to achieve a leap in performance and intelligence without a complete overhaul of the existing cable infrastructure, ensuring a cost-effective and smooth transition.

The university selected Huawei's Xinghe AI High-Quality 10 Gbps Campus Network Solution, with next-generation Wi-Fi 7 Access Points (APs) at its core. This solution was deployed in a one-to-one replacement model over the existing cabling, minimizing deployment complexity and cost.

Core Technological Advancements included:

• Wi-Fi 7 for Unparalleled Performance: The deployment of Huawei's Wi-Fi 7 APs delivered three key advancements. First, higher throughput via 320 MHz channel bandwidth and 4096-QAM modulation enables multi-gigabit speeds, smoothly supporting bandwidth-intensive applications like 4K streaming and VR teaching. Second, more stable connections are achieved through Multi-Link Operation (MLO), allowing devices to transmit data over multiple frequency bands simultaneously for seamless roaming and interruption-free video calls. Third, broader and smarter coverage uses advanced beamforming technology to effectively eliminate previous blind spots.

• 10 Gbps Ready Wired Foundation: To support the wireless edge, Huawei's CloudEngine series multi-GE access switches were deployed. These switches provide flexible, high-power PoE++ ports for the new APs and other IoT devices. At the network core, high-performance switches ensure non-blocking forwarding, creating a robust 10 Gbps backbone ready for future traffic growth.

• Intelligent Management with NCE-Campus: A cornerstone of the solution is the Huawei iMaster NCE-Campus management platform. This AI-driven system provides unified control and visibility across the entire network. It transforms operations from reactive to proactive, enabling features like a digital map for real-time monitoring of network and user experience, rapid fault demarcation, and one-click policy deployment, which significantly simplifies daily administration.

Delivered Outcomes: Measurable Impact Across Teaching, Research, and Operations

The implementation of Huawei's solution has successfully transformed UPV's network from a constraint into a powerful, invisible asset, delivering tangible benefits across all university domains.

• Enhanced Teaching and Learning Experience: High-density classrooms and auditoriums can now effortlessly support hundreds of concurrent device connections. Students and faculty enjoy stable, high-speed access to online resources and cloud-based learning platforms from anywhere on campus. The seamless, millisecond-level roaming ensures that interactive lectures and video collaborations proceed without interruption, making the network reliably "invisible" to the educational process.

• Accelerated Research Capabilities: Researchers benefit from dramatically improved speeds for uploading and downloading large experimental datasets. The stable, low-latency environment facilitates real-time remote control of specialized laboratory equipment and enables seamless participation in international collaborative projects, effectively accelerating the pace of discovery and innovation.

• Optimized Operational Efficiency: The IT management team has experienced a paradigm shift. The NCE-Campus platform has reduced fault diagnosis and location time from hours to minutes. Automated workflows and intelligent analysis free administrators from routine troubleshooting, allowing them to focus on strategic network optimization and planning for future needs. This intelligent O&M capability represents a significant leap in operational maturity.

A Blueprint for Future-Ready Higher Education Infrastructure

The collaboration between Universitat Politècnica de València and Huawei stands as an exemplary model for modernizing higher education infrastructure. By deploying the Xinghe AI-powered 10 Gbps campus network with Wi-Fi 7, UPV has not only resolved immediate connectivity pain points but has also strategically positioned itself for the next decade of digital education and research.

This project demonstrates that through precise technology selection and systematic design, universities can achieve a high-performance, intelligent, and sustainable network evolution in a cost-effective manner, even within the constraints of existing buildings and cabling. UPV's upgraded network now provides the solid, intelligent, and green digital base required to continue its mission as a leader in technical education and innovation, empowering its community to focus on creating knowledge without technological limitations.