Cisco APs Provide Real-World Data for University of Melbourne

Analytics are the backbone of any good decision. If you don’t have all of the numbers, you’re not getting the full picture. Sometimes it’s hard to get the right numbers though. But that’s all changed, getting the numbers is easier than you think – you just need to look to your wireless network. That’s what Australia’s University of Melbourne recently did and the results have been spectacular.

With more than 65,00 students and 6,500 staff, the University of Melbourne is ranked as Australia’s leading research-intensive seat of learning and among the world’s top 50. With this amount of people traipsing through campus each day, the administration was more than curious to know about their activities. What do they do all day? Where do they go? What are the busiest intersections? Which parts of campus sees less foot traffic? The answers to these questions would be helpful when it came time to determine which buildings and services should be developed next or how should the university engage with visitors and prospective students.

With a wireless infrastructure made up of over 4500 Cisco Aironet 1500, 3500, 3600 and 3700 Series Access Points plus Cisco Catalyst 3650, 3750-X and 3850 switches spread out over 250 buildings, the school was able to extract the data available in these devices to help them. To facilitate these numbers, all of the devices were running Cisco Customer Mobile Experiences (CMX) solution.

Using CMX, the university was able to examine traffic patterns from multiple angles and saved a bundle doing so.

“CMX allowed us to gain an insight into traffic activities on campus through the wireless infrastructure and enable plans to minimize disruption,” said Gianni Frigenti, University of Melbourne’s wireless architect. “To get an accurate footfall snapshot, we would have had to spend $15,000 per day on video-based traffic monitoring.”

CMX was an invaluable tool in shaping the school’s five-year plan. The University of Melbourne were able to determine the most and least popular areas on campus and were able to better determine which buildings were used more so that they would be among the first to be modernized.

For more on how the University of Melbourne used Cisco wireless products and CMX, please read the entire case study here.