Campbell Union School District (Campbell USD), located in the heart of Silicon Valley, decided to spend their 2010 summer vacation upgrading their ailing wireless LAN (WLAN). Their existing WLAN wasn’t built to scale. What’s more, it couldn’t reliably support the rapid influx of wireless devices, be centrally managed, or provide the necessary coverage and stability needed to support an increasing number of wireless devices and applications.

Campbell USD’s legacy WLAN included Apple AirPorts and a mixed bag of consumer routers. Without any central management, the IT staff was forced to manually input each device connection into their FreeRADIUS server. Adding further frustration, they were all too frequently experiencing performance, stability, and coverage issues across all 12 sites, spanning five cities.

Like many other public schools, Campbell USD’s IT staff of five was experiencing growing pains with its network and network devices. With over 800 faculty members and 7,500 students, the IT staff was managing thousands of devices. Supporting the entire school district population and individually managing every single device, in addition to their other responsibilities, quickly became a physical challenge and time manage-ment nightmare. They needed a WLAN that was easy to configure, maintain, and troubleshoot; and above all, a Wi-Fi system that could be cen-trally managed via a Web-based interface.

With its existing 802.11g network, Campbell USD experienced unreliable and fluctuating client connectivity. “It was simply unacceptable,” said Derek Moore, Supervisor of Technology at Campbell Union School District. “Getting a stable Wi-Fi connection for students sitting stationary with their laptops placed on the desk in front of them, teachers moving about the classroom, or for those faculty moving from room to room was hit or miss.” Additionally, Campbell USD needed a higher capacity Wi-Fi system that could support many more concurrent connections per AP. Teachers often take advantage of computer carts with 30 or more lap-tops used by students to simultaneously access the wireless network.

“Web connectivity was one of our biggest issues, in particular because our student information system, PowerSchool, is 100% Web-based. So having reliable wireless connectivity across the entire school district quickly became something that needed to work every day — all day, without fail,” said Moore.

Campbell USD’s 12 building sites were not friendly places for RF signals, a common occurrence with many school districts surrounded by towering apartment buildings, massive trees, plentiful electrical poles, and other interference producing elements. As a result, the school district continued to pur-chase and deploy additional APs with the hope of alleviating their Wi-Fi woes. But adding APs was not as simple as just plugging them in and walking away. Each new AP increased both the district’s capi-tal and operational expenditures. Not only did each new AP have to be individually configured, more Ethernet cabling was needed, and more PoE switch ports consumed. And, if an AP became nonre-sponsive, a technician was forced to go on-site to troubleshoot because there was no centralized management or control.

COMPANY OVERVIEWLocated in the heart of Silicon Valley, Campbell Union School District (Campbell USD) is a K-8 school district that operates 13 schools serving preschool through Grade 8: 9 elementary schools, 3 middle schools, and 1 community day school. Its five IT staff support over 800 employees and 7,500 students; managing 4,000 clients, 200 printers, 500 nodes, and thousands of devices.

REQUIREMENTS

• Deploy reliable and affordable Wi-Fi across 12 remote locations

• Easily provide guest access to parents, guests, and visitors

• Unified WLAN with centralized control and administration

• Improve coverage and connectivity to support a rapidly growing wireless device population

• Simplified deployment, troubleshooting, and ongoing maintenance

• Migrate from 802.11g to 802.11n across entire district

SOLUTION

• 100+ ZoneFlex 7962 dual-band 802.11n Smart Wi-Fi access points

• ZoneDirector 3050 WLAN controller

BENEFITS

• Centralized management without the need of a Radius server

• Fast and easy deployment

• Complete coverage across entire district

• One-half the number of APs required over alternative solutions

• Stable client connectivity significantly reducing on-site AP support

• Guest access can be managed by any authorized user without relying on IT to configure each one individually

K-8 EducationC A S E S T U D Y

Campbell Union School District Learns that Deploying Reliable and Affordable Wi-Fi Doesn’t Have to Be Difficult

Campbell Union School District in Silicon Valley turned to Ruckus ZoneFlex to address Wi-Fi coverage, capacity, and reliability issues for its 12-site, K-8 school district.

w w w. r u c k u s w i r e l e s s . c o mCopyright © 2011, Ruckus Wireless, Inc. All rights reserved. Ruckus Wireless and Ruckus Wireless design are registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Ruckus Wireless, the Ruckus Wireless logo, BeamFlex, ZoneFlex, MediaFlex, MetroFlex, FlexMaster, ZoneDirector, SpeedFlex, SmartCast, and Dynamic PSK are trademarks of Ruckus Wireless, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks mentioned in this document or Website are the property of their respective owners. 802-70996-001 rev 01

“The wireless network

is an extension of our

physical network and

just needs to work

every day, all day.

With Ruckus we

don’t have to do a

lot of maintenance or

troubleshooting — it’s

just there and it just

works, period.”

Derek MooreSupervisor of Technology

Campbell Union School District

K-8 EducationC A S E S T U D Y

RIGHTCampbell Union

School District operated a high-

speed fiber network connected 12 sites

across 5 cities.

All Wi-Fi access points are centrally

managed from a single ZoneDirector located

at its district office

So Campbell USD began with a pilot installation within its most troublesome location, the district office. With three sides of the building surrounded by apartment complexes, 30 to 50 SSIDs were constantly broadcasting their signals nonstop, wreaking havoc with their previous Wi-Fi environ-ment. Moore’s IT staff removed the 11 consumer APs and began deploying ZoneFlex 7962s one at a time. They im-mediately saw the difference in coverage and performance and quickly discovered that they could better support the same square footage with only three ZoneFlex 7962s.

“Initially, we had looked at Cisco, Aruba, and Xirrus,” stated Moore.“ But it would have taken twice as many APs and cost us more than double the price when factoring in the recurring support and license fees. What’s more, configur-ing their APs was just too complex and time consuming — a huge factor since we had only a few weeks to upgrade our entire district.”

By standardizing on the Ruckus ZoneFlex Wi-Fi system, Campbell USD was able to deploy fewer APs that provide better coverage at a lower total cost of ownership. In addi-tion, the school district was able to effectively eliminate time-consuming site visits by IT staff.

A single ZoneDirector was deployed over its fiber net-work to centrally manage all the remote APs at each school,

providing full visibility and control into each school’s net-work. Unlike competitive systems that require all WLAN traffic to be funneled through a controller to take advan-tage of advanced features, the Ruckus ZoneDirector can be deployed out of the data path with APs still functioning if the controller loses power or connection to the network.

Linked to the lack of central management was the tedious task of assigning device access. Moore’s staff had to indi-vidually enter the MAC address of each approved device into its Active Directory authentication server. For secu-rity, wireless devices were using the same Pre-Shared Key (PSK). So, when one device went missing, all devices shar-ing that same PSK were compromised.

That agonizingly repetitive task is now a distant mem-ory. The ZD3050 controller communicates directly to Campbell USD’s AD without requiring a RADIUS server. The school district is also utilizing Ruckus patented Dynamic Pre-Shared Key technology that automati-cally configures a dynamic PSK for every device, pro-viding each user with a unique encryption key that is automatically configured on the device upon initial user authentication.

“The Dynamic Pre-Shared Key feature was a huge time saver for us,” concluded Moore. “Now if a device goes

missing or we need to terminate a user, we are only canceling a single account; disabling the user account in Active Directory automatically terminates the individual’s wireless access — it’s just that simple.”

Granting guest access has also been radically simplified with the Ruckus system. Previously only Moore’s IT staff had the know-how to manually enter in each guest’s MAC address. Now guest access is handled by front desk staff by sim-ply logging into the Web-based interface and selecting a few con-figuration options to generate a timed guest pass.

Looking forward, Campbell USD is interested in expanding the wire-less network outdoors to enable the Physical Education teachers, for example, to use their iPads and iPod Touches to take atten-dance, grade, and any other scho-lastic activities that require stable Wi-Fi connectivity.

ActiveDirectory

Server

ZD3050

RosemaryElementary

VillageSchool

BlackfordElementary

CampbellMiddle

CapriElementary

CastlemontElementary

Forest HillElementary

LynhavenElementary

Marshall LaneElementary

MonroeMiddle

Rolling HillsMiddle

Sherman OaksCommunity Charter

8 ZoneFlex 7962 APs

9 ZoneFlex 7962 APs

8 ZoneFlex 7962 APs

7 ZoneFlex 7962 APs9 ZoneFlex 7962 APs

7 ZoneFlex 7962 APs

8 ZoneFlex 7962 APs

7 ZoneFlex 7962 APs

7 ZoneFlex 7962 APs

7 ZoneFlex 7962 APs

9 ZoneFlex 7962 APs9 ZoneFlex 7962 APs

ZoneDirector3000

1 ZoneDirector 30505 ZoneFlex 7962 APs