Education - Higher Education

Wireless Voice

Improving communications anytime, anywhere throughout campuses fosters safer facilities, enhances operational and facilities management processes, and achieves cost savings. Polycom solutions provide campus wide coverage while providing mobility for administrators, faculty, staff and students as they move about the campus and more effectively manage their time. Polycom offers the most durable, feature-rich, and cost-effective VoIP and wireless telephone solutions enhance unified communications to meet institutional challenges.

• Improve mobility - Comply with a changing society to allow administrators, faculty, and staff to connect and collaborate where and when desired
• Enhance safety and security effectiveness - Instantly verify points of contact, communicate instantaneously with vocal and visual access, and view reactions in crisis situations to decisions with a sound of a voice or the touch of a button
• Open communication channels among staff as they manage the daily operations of large campuses

Wireless LAN

With network connectivity a factor in many students' choice of college or university, higher education institutions worldwide are choosing Meru Networks for campus-wide deployments. Each year, thousands of students arrive on campus with a diverse range of laptops and other devices, expecting to connect wirelessly.

No longer just a convenience, the wireless LAN has become the main way that most users reach the campus network and beyond. Wireless devices have already changed the way students live, study and communicate.

Designed for the All-Wireless Enterprise

From the beginning, Meru designed its network for the All-Wireless Enterprise: an organization that never needs to depend on wires for connectivity. College students who have grown up in a world without wires need a network that can combine high performance with mobility, while IT needs to provide high density coverage without sacrificing performance or reliability.

Meru's virtualized Wireless LAN architecture offers students and faculty a wired-like user experience, combined with fast deployments, simple management and a low total cost of ownership.

• Wireless Like Wire. Meru's virtualized wireless LAN offers all the performance that users expect from wired Ethernet combined with the mobility of cellular.
• Quality of Service. Data applications get all the bandwidth they need while toll-quality voice is assured.
• Fewer Access Points. Meru requires fewer access points on campus than other solutions, stretching IT dollars further and simplifying management.
• Airtime Fairness. Each client in a packed lecture hall gets a fair share of the airwaves, letting legacy clients coexist peacefully with the latest 802.11n devices.
• Strong Security and Simple Management. It is easy to control the diverse devices that students connect to a network, ensuring that badly-behaved clients do not affect overall performance or compromise security.

IP Telephony / Unified communications

Universities and colleges using traditional legacy PABXs are often burdened with systems that have limited functionality, are expensive to maintain, use proprietary handsets and do not interface with their other computer applications.

Many of these sites maintain a number of disparate systems from different vendors, providing additional challenges for seamless integration of their communications network. Combined with increasing demands to reduce call costs, improve staff productivity and become more customer responsive, there are increasing requirements for improved staff and student safety and security.

Higher education IT managers are increasingly turning to implementation of IP Telephony, platforms, which address these issues, including:

1. Lower total cost of ownership: Universities are able to leverage their existing LAN infrastructure to control costs of cabling and network maintenance by moving to a single network environment. For older sites which may attract Heritage listings, issues relating to adding cabling and drilling walls are minimised as much as possible. Costs are also reduced with access to a wider range of standards-based IP equipment, and common adds, moves and changes can easily be implemented by in-house IT staff via browser interface.
2. Improve staff productivity and customer service: A true unified communications platform delivers the ability to integrate with the computer desktop and common applications (eg Outlook, CRM etc). Delivering faxes and voicemails directly to Outlook simplifies management of all communication forms, improving responsiveness to colleagues and students.
3. Enhance Safety: Having an accessible IP PBX allows administrators to proactively disseminate critical information to staff and students during an emergency. IP PBXs support wireless SIP devices (Wi-Fi or DECT), providing enabling wireless PBX extensions across an entire campus.