Columbia Public Schools (CPS) has deployed Ruckus Smart WiFi products and technology.
The company said this is the nation’s first production deployment of Gigabit class WiFi using 802.11ac Wave 2 specification access point (AP).
In addition, schools like Shelby County Schools (TN), Pitt County Schools (NC), and Vancouver Public Schools (WA) will also use Ruckus Wave 2 Gigabit WiFi.
CPS will deploy more than 1,400 Ruckus ZoneFlex R710 802.11ac Wave 2 APs which are managed through a cluster of Ruckus SmartZone 100 controllers.
Company officials said Ruckus Smart wiFi products and technology will serve over 18,000 students and staff, and nearly 20,000 WiFi-enabled devices across more than 30 K-12 schools.
The CPS WiFi infrastructure is used to support a range of applications and services, such as teacher evaluations, in-class collaboration, guest access, student information systems, Apple Air Servers, Google Apps, scientific simulations, video streaming and IP-based security cameras.
The company said CPS has selected Ruckus technology after considering Cisco (Meraki), Aruba, and Aerohive as Ruckus delivered twice the WiFi capacity, and higher levels of TCP throughput at longer ranges, with a 60 to 70 percent reduction in the number of access points required.
The ZoneFlex R710 is equipped with dual Gigabit Ethernet ports with link aggregation support to satisfy peak throughput requirements for maximum investment protection and the ZoneFlex R710 maintains full 4×4:4 802.11ac functionality with standard 802.3af Power over Ethernet (PoE).
Additionally, ZoneFlex R710 access points maximize uplink performance and offers unmatched reception of weak mobile client signals.
Shilpa Khatri
