12 Important Considerations When Selecting Your K-12 Wireless Vendor

K-12 Wi-Fi Success Factors 1 PLAN FOR CAPACITY, NOT COVERAGE: Plan for more wireless LAN capacity than you think you will need even if you can t afford it currently With optimal planning upfront, you can make it simple to add capacity later without having to completely re-architect the network. Don t just design your network for coverage plan for capacity, and lots of it. School districts are demanding more from wireless: Entire classrooms of students running real-time collaborative software with screen sharing; online testing requirements; hundreds or thousands of laptops, ipads or Chromebooks streaming lessons and educational videos. Whenever and wherever they are in a school building or campus, students, teachers, visitors, and staff strive for uninterrupted learning. They expect a fast, seamless connection to the network that just a few short years ago could only be delivered by plugging into a wired connection. Now with the latest Wi-Fi technology 802.11ac showing up in everything from smartphones to notebooks to tablets, the promise of Gigabit Wi-Fi is becoming a reality. Unfortunately, because of most Wi-Fi vendors architectural approaches, early implementations suffer from co-channel interference above a 40-MHz channel width, which cuts 802.11ac s ideal bandwidth by 50 percent. Even worse, some wireless LAN (WLAN) vendors products require a forklift upgrade for the wired switches to add 802.3at Power over Ethernet (PoE) to support access points using 802.11ac s powerful 3X3:3 MIMO radios. A vendor that delivers a maximum return on your 802.11ac investment must provide the capacity you need now, along with a path for seamless transition to meet future bandwidth needs, while saving on switching upgrade costs money that s better spent on increasing Wi-Fi capacity. 2 DON T DISCOUNT THE IMPORTANCE OF RF CAPABILITIES: Plan for RF channel design as a critical aspect of your deployment and ensure vendors can adapt to meet the changing needs of your environments and users. Online assessments and Common Core testing are becoming vital to measuring the effectiveness of schools. The requirements of online assessments especially when combined with 802.11ac s upcoming second-wave channel limitations mean schools must properly account and plan for optimal channel usage so that all online testing and assessments are performed in a secure, reliable environment. Vendors that can provide enough capacity via one or two non-overlapping channels deliver a significant advantage in ensuring a stable environment. Ask your prospective WLAN vendors how they can dedicate channels to different applications or devices to ensure the highest level of stability and performance. Copyright 2014 Meru Networks, Inc. All rights reserved. 2

3 BUY FOR TOMORROW S SPECS NOT TODAY S: You must assume that 80-MHz channels will be needed in the near future. Video is the main medium, and bandwidth-intensive, high-definition video will be streamed over the wireless. Accurate planning for a wireless LAN that can handle 80-MHz channels is vital, and knowing how a vendor will approach deploying 80-MHz wide channels will eliminate future headaches. As schools purchase more and more high-density 802.11ac clients and students and staff continue to join the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) movement vendors must provide a solution that can adequately handle voice, data, and video. As video becomes a vital part of a school s learning solution, maximizing the potential of your wireless system s 80-MHz capability will be essential. 4 MAKE SURE YOUR WI-FI VENDOR KNOWS K-12: Schools need a vendor that can work on the schedule of your school district and can assist with long-term planning. Ensure your selected vendor focuses on education and is geared to support back-to-school timeframes in terms of support and software releases. Why further complicate the start of the school year with squeezing in updates or upgrades when you can have your wireless system up-to-date prior to the first day of school? If a vendor cannot work on a school-year schedule, it can cause significant delays in receiving equipment, which can lead to more support cases, less consistency, and ultimately poor performance, which will affect the learning environment for your students and staff. Having a vendor who has experience in large-scale school districts is vital particularly with planning for all of the applications and device types that will be used on the network. For example, there are two ways to deploy LANSchool classroom management software: One way is extremely burdensome to the WLAN, while the other is less stressful. Without a vendor that has hands-on experience or with a vendor that has a short-term focus your district could get stuck with a WLAN that isn t optimally deployed for 1:1 initiatives. Your vendor needs to offer the flexibility required in K-12 environments. Classrooms are repurposed, cafeterias become testing centers, and new applications and devices are introduced all the time. A true value-add lies with a vendor that can assist with wellness assessments for your wireless LAN, short-term and long-term planning, preparation, and overall management. Your chosen vendor should flex with your needs and minimize RF site surveying and disruption. Copyright 2014 Meru Networks, Inc. All rights reserved. 3

5 CONSUMER DEVICES ON AN ENTERPRISE NETWORK: If you have Apple devices and plan to use AirPlay orairprint, be sure to probe how the wireless vendor can handle Apple Bonjour to ensure that it can properly route traffic to the correct Apple device and secure it as well. You don t want students streaming content to Apple TVs in the next classroom, nor do you want to have them printing across campus. Students expect to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want. Whether devices are provided by their schools or are BYOD, school IT professionals are seeing an explosion of Apple devices, such as MacBook, ipad, ipod, and iphone, for collaboration in classrooms. Users expect to be connected immediately and stay connected, but long login times, bandwidthhogging older devices, roaming issues, the chatty Bonjour protocol, or the sheer capacity crunch of hundreds of students with thousands of mobile devices in a wing of a school can lead to unmet expectations and interrupted learning. In addition, many teachers are moving to flipped classrooms, putting their lessons and resources online, so students can access them at any time with their tablets or notebooks. As a result, students take more responsibility for their own learning, and teachers can increase their interactions and personalize content to students needs. Teachers are using Apple devices and services to engage students and add interactivity and flexibility to their teaching. They record lessons and upload them to YouTube, and use AirPlay and Apple TV with ipads to screen share and turn traditional one-way lessons into rich, collaborative sessions where students and instructors build content together. In addition, using AirPrint for printing and connecting to school resources such as printers and projects without any special client configurations or need to download specific device drivers is becoming essential. It s critical to understand that simply turning on Bonjour radically impacts the overall performance of your network. A successful vendor must be able to overcome BYOD challenges by offering every school IT professional the freedom of choice, flexibility of deployment, and confidence of control despite constant change and accelerating demand for wireless while meeting the ultimate goal of supporting uninterrupted learning. 6 NETWORK CONTROL VS. CLIENT CONTROL: A top-tier vendor will have solutions to ensure control of your traffic, bandwidth, and seamless roaming and ensure a balance of airtime fairness for your students, faculty, and staff. Anywhere, anytime connectivity is moving from a nice-to-have to a must-have at schools worldwide. Digital teaching and learning is the new norm, and students and teachers are using Wi-Fi devices like laptops, tablets, e-readers, and smartphones to access and interact with online instructional content, collaborate, and share information and data. With BYOD, students may be using different devices to connect to the network some with the latest and greatest tablets and others with five-year old laptops but everyone must have equal access to learning. That means no matter which device they use, every student must have reliable, seamless connectivity to the wireless network. A vendor should provide flexibility at the access layer to deliver fair, reliable, and predictable connectivity in classrooms, along with ubiquitous coverage for online learning, whether in classrooms, cafeterias, hallways, libraries, stadiums, outdoors, and even in teachers homes. Time-consuming RF channel planning is a drag on optimal performance and access. Ensuring seamless mobility, predictable voice and video performance, and ample capacity in dense environments and during peak usage is critical. Copyright 2014 Meru Networks, Inc. All rights reserved. 4

7 BE OPEN: Maximize the potential of software-defined networking (SDN), OpenFlow, and sflow solutions. Unified management of your wireless system will be a key point of keeping the wireless system operating at optimal levels. Vendors should provide a solution that is OpenFlow-compliant and capable of supporting SDN applications via an SDN controller of the district s choosing. Because managing user authentication and the network are vital to ensuring optimal network performance, having single-pane-of-glass configuration and management for your wired and wireless network in a vendor-agnostic environment is fast becoming necessary. Ensuring your network is equipped to handle the heavy bandwidth requirements of video streaming in one building, while standardized testing is being run on another RF channel, while your English classes are uploading video book reports to YouTube and being able to ensure that you can manage the access and performance of this system from one a single console will become an everyday occurrence as schools transition from traditional educational methods to a technology-based focus. 8 DON T WORRY ABOUT WHERE THE CONTROLLER IS. FOCUS ON THE TEACHER/STUDENT EXPERIENCE: A successful wireless system must support 1:1 deployment and have at least 50 customer references where they have implemented everything from donated Chromebooks to BYOD and everything in between. Vendors will try to get you to focus on architecture, when you should be focused on the quality of the connection and its throughput capability at scale! A vendor s WLAN technology must provide a secure, stable, high performance foundation for a 1:1 environment. The 1:1 environment should be designed to help students reach levels of technology competence aligned with the advanced educational criteria of the school, ensuring the delivery of instruction with a variety of hardware and software so that faculty, staff, and students are comfortable with and adept in their use. In addition, the WLAN must deliver an always-on learning environment school-wide, where all apps are always accessible by everyone. Many schools believe that students need individual mobile access to online resources to take full advantage of all of the educational opportunities available to them via technology. The 1:1 initiative these schools envision is based on students and staff all having a personal device to bring each day giving the teachers a common platform to teach from and the students a common link for collaboration. This mobile device taps into the power of the Internet and weaves it into the fabric of day-to-day learning. A 1:1 initiative allows teachers to provide instant feedback to students on weekends or after hours, along with providing students with the ability to submit finished projects immediately. This environment allows for more feedback and better communication, with the ultimate goal of a more interactive learning experience. As schools and teachers shift to use Facebook groups and Google Docs to collaborate and share information, an effective 1:1 solution makes it easier, since everyone has access to these devices in class. Copyright 2014 Meru Networks, Inc. All rights reserved. 5

9 TEACHERS SHOULDN T BE HELPDESKS AND YOUR WI-FI SHOULDN T BE WASTED: Onboarding, authentication, and guest management the task of ensuring authorized devices connect easily and securely while other devices do not should be easy. Network bandwidth and RF spectrum must be protected and leveraged for teaching and learning, not gaming and Netflix. If your educators spend the first 15 minutes of class getting students logged in, they are losing instructional time. That s unacceptable. Vendors should have a formal and proven guest management system that provides student onboarding and off-boarding. Although often overlooked, as Wi-Fi becomes more precious, keeping non-learning devices off the network will be a critical part of ensuring that both spectrum and bandwidth are allocated to the business of teaching. You also need to be able to off-board students and their devices as they move from one grade to the next and graduate. 10 KEEP YOUR COOL WITH AC: Choose a vendor who can provide a full suite of 802.11ac products for easy installation to fit your exact needs. Make sure they are running those products in K-12 environments and have been for some time. Don t be the guinea pig! Vendors should view Wi-Fi as an everywhere service and provide a full suite of indoor and outdoor APs that are designed for a variety of environments. Can your vendor provide 802.11ac access points with 3x3 MIMO? 2x2 MIMO? Dual radio? Wall-plate units? Outdoor options? The variety of selections may not be pertinent now, but there will be scenarios when an outside-the-box solution may be exactly what you need and your vendor must have the intuition, flexibility, scalability, and product catalog to support any possible scenario. Most schools require simultaneous support for multiple applications, each with its own set of unique requirements. The challenge is that these applications typically reside within the same classroom. The ability to make AP configuration changes, such as data rates or beacon intervals on a per-essid basis vs. a per-ap basis, is paramount. 11 YOU AREN T GETTING 10 NEW WI-FI SUPPORT TECHS: Take the burden of support and troubleshooting away from your internal staff. The fact is that many districts support organizations are understaffed, under-trained, or both. It is imperative that they are armed with easy-to-use management and troubleshooting applications. In particular, since many helpdesk calls or user complaints pertain to past events, management applications must be able to play back all details regarding prior events. Nobody knows what devices will hit your network 12 months from now, what operating systems they will run, and what applications will be required. Make sure that you have the tools and the support you will need. Copyright 2014 Meru Networks, Inc. All rights reserved. 6

12 HIDDEN COSTS ARE EVERYWHERE: Why incur more capital expenses, when you can use existing infrastructure? The power-over-ethernet (PoE) infrastructure within many schools is aging, and budget constraints often prevent upgrades. This should in no way impede a school s ability to migrate to 802.11ac, the latest Wi-Fi standard. Schools should seek WLAN vendors whose APs enable all of the promised benefits of 802.11ac, while not requiring costly PoE upgrades. You ll want to make certain that you can use your existing 802.3af power, and not have to move to 802.3at for your PoEs. Notice ALL INFORMATION PROVIDED IN THIS WHITE PAPER, INCLUDING COMMENTARY, OPINION, MERU NETWORKS DESIGN SPECIFICATIONS, AND OTHER DOCUMENTS (TOGETHER AND SEPARATELY, MATERIALS ) ARE BEING PROVIDED AS IS. MERU NETWORKS MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESSED, IMPLIED, STATUTORY, OR OTHERWISE WITH RESPECT TO MATERIALS, AND EXPRESSLY DISCLAIMS ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF NONINFRINGEMENT, MERCHANTABILITY, AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. Information furnished is believed to be accurate and reliable. However, Meru Networks assumes no responsibility for the consequences of use of such information or for any infringement of patents or other rights of third parties that may result from its use. No license is granted by implication or otherwise. This publication, including product specifications and capabilities mentioned herein, is subject to change without notice. For more information, visit www.merunetworks.com or email your questions to: meruinfo@merunetworks.com Trademarks Meru and Meru Networks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Meru Networks in the United States. Other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated. Copyright 2014 Meru Networks, Inc. All rights reserved. 7.14 WP1018.US Corporate Headquarters 894 Ross Drive, Sunnyvale, CA 94089 T +1.408.215.5300 F +1.408.215.5301 E meruinfo@merunetworks.com