Spanish University Takes a Big Leap into the Future with Cisco

Spain’s University of León was slowly starting to fall behind the country’s other universities. The reason? An outdated wireless network was making it tough for communication and idea sharing. Both the teachers and the students were equally frustrated by the speed of the network and consequently it wasn’t being used much anymore.

This is not a good position for a modern university to find itself in.

The University of León did what any organization would do when faced with the same problem: after testing three vendors, they chose the best: Cisco.

“We found Cisco access points were the easiest to manage and the most robust with the same solid performance as our wired infrastructure,” said Francisco Pérez Laorden, University of León’s Head of Communications.

Creating a wireless network infrastructure that employed Cisco Aironet 1700 Series and 2700 Series Access Points with Catalyst 2960 and 6500 Series Switches allowed for a much faster and more robust wireless network. Now the university can support 5,000 concurrent users with 100 percent coverage across the campus. The students and staff have noticed that the network is stronger and they have responded. There has been a spike of 70 percent more wireless traffic.

Now that the WiFi is working properly, professors are able to use online resources while teaching. These resources make for a more rich educational experience adding depth to the professors’ classroom lectures. In the future the school is going to deploy more on-demand applications and add more devices now that their bandwidth has grown.