AirWave Podcast with CSU San Marcos [15:31m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

As some of you may have heard, the California State University System announced back in September that all 23 schools will eventually be moving off of Cisco WLAN gear and onto Aruba Networks products. AirWave is currently being used to manage and monitor wireless networks at 7 of the CSU campuses including CSU San Marcos.

In this episode of AirWaves I spoke with John Humes who is the Network Manager at CSU San Marcos and was on the evaluation committee that selected Aruba as the standard for the CSU system moving forward.

Like many of the CSU schools, San Marco is currently using Cisco for their WLAN infrastructure and John discusses the issues he faces on a daily basis and how a tool like AirWave makes his life easier.

John also describes the migration path and how AirWave’s multi-vendor capabilities will play a strategic role in their network moving forward.

 

 Standard Podcast: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Managing anything in a K-12 environment can be a very strenuous activity. Imagine all those different school buildings, thousands of students, parents, and teachers and then multiply that by government regulation and bureaucracy. In this episode of AirWaves we speak with Michael Cooper of Oak Hills Local School District who has been managing a Cisco autonomous AP based network for several years. Michael shares his thoughts on WLAN network management and how he transitioned from an, “I’ll just console in,” management style to valuing the benefits of an enterprise grade network management tool. Please take a listen and provide your feedback in our forums.

We recently hosted a webinar (click to view) with Craig Mathias on wireless trends for the upcoming year. Craig, as always, did a very interesting job of talking about both WWAN and WLAN technologies as well as the impact on devices and users. By far the topic that is generating the most interest is 802.11n. Most questions centered around the additional speed and coverage that “n” brings but also a lot of questions about how “n” will co-exist with existing a/b/g networks. One of Craig’s main points was the “n” shouldn’t be considered a replacement for “g” and should be used to augment existing networks. He also stressed using “n” in the 5GHz range (same as 802.11a) to avoid interference with existing “g” networks.

Craig was able to answer quite a few questions and if you have some of your own feel free to post them on our forum.