Wireless Update Jeff Farese, Network Operations Good morning everyone. Wireless is a key service and one that students, faculty and staff have come to depend on. Demand for wireless service continues to increase with a desire for grater mobility and convenience as the driving factors for wireless consumption and expansion This morning … I am going be giving a wireless status presentation which covers Where we were a year ago What we have done over the past year The major problems we have experienced Where we are going

Wireless Challenges Where we were 1 year ago: Almost 1/3 of all Wireless Access Points(WAP’s) were at or near End of Life Central controllers had reached their capacity Lecture halls were being underserved in both coverage and capacity Numerous wireless coverage issues in residence halls 1200 WAPS were at or near EOL, Total AP’s at the time was 3600; Multiple models of access points were EOL and these access points had the most modest of capabilities of all WAPs in operation this meant not only were the old and failing but the ones that still worked were… (old and least capable = support fewer clients with less throughput and weaker radios) Central controllers were also near the end of their use full and they were having difficulty keeping up with client authentication, poor scale, performance bottlenecks Capacity issues in larger seating lecture halls - Dynamic RF environments make it difficult to respond and remediate wireless coverage issues.

Wireless Improvements In the past year there have been over $900K in wireless infrastructure improvements Complete replacement of central controllers Refresh of 1200 EOL or near EOL Wireless Access Points(WAP) Large lecture hall augmentation Residence hall proof of concept Consolidation from 5 HA pairs of WISM2’s to 2 HA pairs of 8540 Throughput =40 Gbps Access Point Support =6,000 Client Support = 64,000 in comparison to WISM2 1000 AP 10k client 10G max Client connectivity is between 20-30k concurrent users at any given time 1200 AP’s were replaced in 2 short windows over breaks and between semesters with minimal outages. Lecture hall – meet the increasing technology demands from students and teachers. Residence hall POC - test out a more individualized way of delivering wireless service and to improve the overall experience. We worked with Residential life to create a MOU for a dedicate lifecycle replacement program. 1/5 of the WAP will be refreshed annually. Based on results of the POC and the MOU we will be targeting South, Mansfield Apts, and Northwood Apts. over winter break.

Large Lecture Halls High client density locations require specialized designs to ensure adequate capacity and coverage 30 lecture halls were assessed.  We focused on locations with greater than 75 seats. 47 new access points were added across these locations.    20 in the lecture halls 27 in the hallways to offset load of students waiting for class Understanding that Professors and instructors rely on online based curriculum content and testing.  Students are bringing to class more devices with higher degrees of utilization   Expanding wireless service and improving capacity, students can more effectively access online content * The addition of reinforcement wireless outside the lecture halls prevents congregating students from sapping the available bandwidth from the current class in session. As an example 2-3 devices per individual  -600 total for a 200-seat lecture hall  Challenges room shape, ceiling height, etc  

New Installations 400 New Access Point Installations Renovations and New Construction Projects 400 New Access Point Installations Next Generation CT Hall Gentry Monteith Building

Wireless Issues Timeline 8/30 Code is upgraded on other controller pair to improve stability 9/9 10/5 -Today Controllers fail into an unrecoverable state causing an extended outage. TAC escalates to a P1 outage and code is upgraded again. Full service is restored around 10 PM 9/1 Cisco brings in onsite engineering to work with their code development group to identify and remediate connectivity issues. Over this time 4 new bugs are identified and resolved 8/12 Widespread Connectivity issues reported and TAC case is opened 9/2 10/1 – 10/5 Code is upgraded on one controller to support new buildings coming online Multiple controller failures occur requiring a code upgrade Clients in Monteith, Gentry, Next Gen and Putnam continue to experience connectivity issues August September October 8/25 9/3 -9/8 9/10 – 9/30 Continue to work with TAC while controller and client issues persist Controllers stabilize but clients continue to experience issues. Code is upgraded as fixes are released One of the controller pairs exhibits signs of instability, first reports of client issues

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