Oxford University college meets BYOD demand

Alcatel-Lucent has implemented a major upgrade to the IT infrastructure of St. Anne's College, one of the largest colleges within the University of Oxford, upgrading its wireless network to improve 'customer service' to the 550 fee-paying students as well as staff as they increasingly make use of their own laptops, tablets and smartphones.

The upgrade includes the implementation of Alcatel-Lucent's OmniSwitch family of products, providing St. Anne's with a flexible edge network and delivering enterprise grade Wi-Fi through high-performance 802.11n wireless access points, to all students around the college.

The solution was delivered by Alcatel-Lucent's channel partner Khipu Networks – a Cyber Security Solutions provider which has a large presence within the education sector in UK, Europe and South Africa, providing network access, visibility and control solutions – and supports the college's Bradford Networks, Network Sentry solution for increased security.

Commenting on the project, Ben West, Deputy IT Manager of St. Anne's College commented: "We can cover a greater area with our new network infrastructure, and protect with better security. We're able to segregate our networks, which has proved essential as we've expanded our conference centre facility over the last few years. The network automatically puts a guest onto the correct network, and is significantly faster, offering all of our users an enhanced experience. And since we first deployed Alcatel-Lucent enterprise technology, we have had to raise no support calls to our partner, Khipu Networks – the solution simply does what it needs to do!"

David Parker, Vice President and General Manager for the UK and Ireland for the Alcatel-Lucent enterprise business also commented: "This upgrade is essential for St. Anne’s College to provide a reliable and pervasive wireless service. With the BYOD phenomenon significantly driven by end-user demands, this is a great example of a higher education facility embracing this trend and moving forward with its IT to be able to support greater engagement amongst students and staff alike. We look forward to extending the solution further to enable full wireless coverage across the entire college."

This announcement is the second major higher education network infrastructure order in the UK to be announced by Alcatel-Lucent in the last six months, following the implementation of an extensive wireless LAN solution throughout the University of Portsmouth. In the United States, Alcatel-Lucent also announced a groundbreaking network infrastructure installation for the California State University.