Increased demand for bandwidth capacity to support the growing needs of colleges and universities has led some campuses to consider adding private wireless networks to their connectivity ecosystem.
As colleges and universities have accelerated their adoption and integration of new technologies as a result of the pandemic, the “Connected Campus” is the new model for determining the path forward in supporting next-generation campus services and operations. Scott Midkiff, Virginia Tech’s Chief Information Officer, said that on a typical day, their campus network connects 35,000-41,000 devices, hosts 19,000 unique users, and uses 51 to 71 Terabytes of data.
“As demand grows, we are looking forward to having cellular as a key part of our connected campus strategy,” said Midkiff at the recent Fierce Education online event: “Higher Education: The Connected Campus.” All the event sessions are available on-demand here.
Virginia Tech connects the campus primarily with ethernet, wi-fi, and the individual cellular carriers that service the main campus in Blacksburg, Virginia. Midkiff sees growth in all three areas as the gap between what the university and cellular companies provide continues to change.
The old stone, gothic buildings on the campus as well as the newer energy-efficient buildings provide challenges in coverage and capacity. The campus is now deploying Wi-Fi 6 for student residence halls and outside coverage, although they do not anticipate they will cover the entire campus outside. “Student residences are where we see the greatest demand for coverage and capacity, which we support with wi-fi and ethernet to accommodate gaming and streaming,” said Midkiff. “We also use carrier-funded distributed antenna system (DAS) for the football stadium and six residence halls. with other venues in planning stages.” And Midkiff reports that operational IT is a growing area of need.”
Looking Ahead to Greater Connection
“Ethernet is here to stay and wi-fi is increasingly important to the university,” said Midkiff. “Wi-fi is the primary connection to campus.” Midkiff believes that cellular and wi-fi are complementary with different use cases and will continue to grow, especially with the availability of 5G (and 6G or NextG) services. “We do anticipate new capabilities for private cellular operated by the university, mostly for specialized use cases,” said Midkiff. “However, we will not replace wi-fi with private cellular,” he said. “We will continue to coordinate coverage with ethernet, wi-fi, and cellular.”
“There are challenges with private cellular,” said Midkiff, “beginning with the fact that it needs additional infrastructure to maintain and operate.” Other challenges include developing workers’ skills and knowledge base; new tasks to manage licensed and unlicensed spectrum; and no clear path to neutral host services. “We also don’t know how expensive private cellular will be. It’s one of the things we’re going to learn,” said Midkiff. “We want to see if we can deploy and operate this model in the same way we did with wi-fi.
Virginia Tech operates its own wi-fi network and helps other state universities as well. “If we didn’t have our own team and capacity, we would look to managed service providers (MSPs),” said Midkiff. “However, we’re in discussion with an MSP to supply connectivity with our smart farm and agricultural resources adjacent to campus.” They are still exploring this possibility as a long-term solution for the adjacent properties.
“There’s no doubt that wi-fi and private cellular can co-exist,” said Midkiff. “We have also purchased four blocks of priority access licenses for Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) to help expand our capacity.” Campus priorities for use of the CBRS licenses include:
- Research and education: wireless and spectrum research; student projects; other research areas, such as smart farming and sensor networks.
- Operations: private LTE/5G for the Internet of Things (IoT), video, and potential neutral host voice service.
- Rural and regional broadband through partnerships: As a land grant university, Virginia Tech feels an obligation to serve others.
Mark Brant from Nokia, the session’s sponsor, said that institutions must evolve their wireless communications infrastructure so they can offer high-performing services to help students, academic staff, researchers and operations teams to work more productively. “We may find that private wireless may have a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) over the product lifetime as 5 to 7 years of wi-fi service,” said Brant.
With the CBRS spectrum opening, Brant believes this is a great opportunity to deploy private wireless as part of expanding service to campuses. “The time is right for the deployment of wireless in this environment.”
For more articles from “The Connected Campus”, see: