Today’s learning environments are evolving and growing at a rapid pace, with more students & faculty accessing and sharing online content than ever before.  For many schools, it is a balancing act to meet the demand for ever-increasing bandwidth on a secure network utilizing fixed budgets and existing IT staffing levels.  

In March of 2016, Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced the launch of the Classroom Connectivity Initiative, designed to facilitate access to technology in a world where learning is no longer confined to the pages of a book or the walls of a classroom. Working with the Texas Education Agency and Education Service Centers like Region 6, the State aims to equip every classroom with robust connectivity to support each student’s digital learning experience.

How often do you say “Wow, this WiFi is great!”? WiFi is like a utility, you take it for granted until the lights don’t turn on or water doesn’t come out of the tap. Just like the electrical grid or the water infrastructure, WiFi takes planning to implement correctly and maintenance to keep running smoothly.

The great news is that WiFi keeps getting smarter and Mojo is leading the way with Cognitive WiFi™. An example of our dedication to excellent user experience is how the C-130 uses its third radio and Dynamic Channel Selection (DCS) to quickly, reliably, and automatically detect disruptive interference.

We recently performed a benchmark test to see how well access points avoided channels with high WiFi and non-WiFi interference on boot up and during operation. We evaluated how well the AP avoided interference and how user experience was impacted.

The Mojo C-130 was the only access point to avoid interference 100% of the time, on both boot up and when introduced on the operating channel. All other solutions failed to avoid a channel with a constant interference source that made the channel unusable, or failed to change channels when the channel utilization got so high that it severely impacted the user experience.

User experience was evaluated using the following quality score rating system:

Recently, I received a ‘Thank You’ letter from IEEE President & CEO for making a contribution to an IEEE fund that helps advance technology for humanity and realize full potential of IEEE. The IEEE President listed three areas of global concern – access to high speed Internet, adequate sanitation and electric power. Today Internet access is indeed as fundamental as having electric power and sanitation. This is reflected in policies across nations worldwide.

For instance, in India, Prime Minister Modi has outlined his vision for every Indian to have high speed access to Internet. Its akin to a Prime Minister laying out the vision for expressways for speedy and hassle free movement of vehicles across the country. A network of good roads and good communication infrastructure are critical to growth and prosperity. Hon. Indian Prime Minister is on the mark putting digitization along with ‘Swaccha Bharat’ as a top national priority.

In an emerging economy like India where wired network infrastructure is limited largely to urban areas, wireless Internet access is an attractive proposition. People love the convenience of wireless access even if the quality of connection is poor. You don't have to be glued to one place as it happens when using a landline phone or a computer connected to an Ethernet cable. Wireless access is ubiquitous as the entire space becomes the medium of communication. Governments around the world have recognized this as a national asset and have sold radio spectrum at a charge. While this creates revenue for governments, it can work against building affordable communication infrastructure. WiFi on the other hand operates in 2.4GHz and 5.0GHz radio spectrums that are unlicensed; one can operate in these frequency ranges without having to pay a license fee. This is very important as telecom operators, Internet service providers can build networking infrastructure using WiFi without having to pay for the spectrum. Coming to my road analogy, one needs a combination of toll roads and non toll roads. Both have their place in creating the infrastructure. In a country like India where sensitivity to pricing is high, WiFi will not only de-congest expensive licensed radio spectrum like 4G LTE but will reduce the cost significantly.

Smart cities and public hotspots are among the best known use cases of WiFi. However, many other innovative ways exist. For instance, top national colleges like IITs, NITs, IIITs and IIMs want WiFi across their campuses and spend considerable time and effort putting together vendors to look for this technology. There is a very good chance that requirements are largely the same for all of them and hence these need not be handled individually. A massively scalable WiFi Management Console that can manage WiFi at say top 100 national universities with a sharable architecture while giving flexibility to each university is feasible. The same approach can be used for smart cities, government departments and even Gram Panchayats. A unified approach for critical national digital infrastructure is efficient and possible with the current state of the art in WiFi technology.

The data center industry has embraced hardware/software disaggregation promoted by Open Compute Project (OCP) in servers and switches. It brings benefits of cost, flexibility and innovation. OCP has now started a working group called Campus, Branch and Wireless (CBW) to extend disaggregation concept to enterprise networking. For additional details on OCP/CBW whitebox WLAN AP, see this #wlpc 2017 video presentation by @CHemantC. Mojo Networks has been an active contributor to the CBW group. At the recently concluded Open Compute Summit in Santa Clara, we demonstrated open install of Mojo WLAN software on the latest Qualcomm 802.11ac Wave 2 AP platforms manufactured by 3 different hardware vendors (ODMs). 

On any given day, the Santa Rosa County School District has 30,000 students accessing WiFi across 31 elementary, middle and high schools.  As WiFi is quickly becoming the prevalent network access technology in schools, Santa Rosa knew they needed to have a secure and reliable WiFi network in order to provide a pristine user experience on an ongoing basis.

The School District needed a comprehensive WiFi network monitoring and security solution that would provide complete visibility and control of the wireless airspace, all of which was lacking in the wireless controller solution previously deployed. With a small central IT staff to cover the 31 school locations, the ability to remotely manage and quickly troubleshoot WiFi networks was critical.