Converged Access Simplifies Wired-Wireless Management at Camden Schools

The Camden City School District in New Jersey is made up of 26 Schools with approximately 29 buildings that cater to 12,000 students and 2500 employees. The School District decided to go with Converged Access to enable a single pane of glass for the wired and wireless network, and drive better network performance with 802.11ac.

The Converged Access deployment at the School District is based on Catalyst 3850 and drives 30 Access Points in each Elementary School and 60 Access Points in each High School. Each building has three Catalyst 3850 switches per IDF,  with one switch acting as a Mobility Controller, and others acting as Mobility Agents. They currently deploy a switch peer group per school except in high schools where they have two switch peer groups.

The School District is very satisfied with the network performance with Converged Access. After the success of the original Pilot across 4 schools, they have now expanded the CA deployment to the rest of the district and now have 85 Catalyst 3850 switches and 430 Access Points (300 3702AP and 130 3602AP). According to Patrick McGlinchey, Deputy Director for Network Architecture at Camden School District, “We really like the ability to consolidate wired and wireless management with Converged Access. By terminating the wireless traffic at the access switch we are able to extend wired resources to wireless users, e.g. Flexible Netflow. We also like the single CLI for both the switch as well as the controller functionality.”

Camden School District is now planning to make use of the advanced wired and wireless features like Plug’nPlay to facilitate change management and Cisco Discovery Gateway to advertise mDNS services. They are also in the process of deploying ISE for Wired-Wireless Policy and Prime Infrastructure 2.1 for Management.

For more information visit the Product website for Catalyst 3850, Catalyst 3650 and 5760 WLC