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The University of Tokyo, with more than 4,000 faculty and staff, and a total enrolment of about 29,000 students, reportedly has upgraded its wireless network at the School of Science on its main Hongo Bunkyo-ku campus with Aruba’s adaptive 802.11n wireless solution.

 

The university is using Aruba’s MMC-6000 Mobility Controller, 300 access points, and the AirWave (News - Alert) Wireless Management Suite for network enhancement.

 

Officials at the university said that the main criteria for Aruba selection was for its Adaptive Radio Management technology that offers solid performance, scalability, and legacy client support compared to single channel and other architectures that were reviewed.

 

Junji Tamatsukuri, the University of Tokyo’s IT System team leader, said, “The School of Science is an ideal deployment because it encompasses multiple buildings, such as Koshiba Hall, that are challenging RF environments for which 802.11n is well suited.”

 

He continued: “Our side-by-side comparison of available 802.11n solutions, both from Aruba, our incumbent supplier, and other vendors, quickly focused our attention on the benefits of ARM (News - Alert) technology. ARM offers predictable performance, automatic and continuous network optimization, and backward compatibility with existing clients. Other 802.11n architectures and vendors that we investigated simply could not match the features and benefits of Aruba’s solution.”

 

Aruba’s ARM technology lowers WiFi (News - Alert) deployment and maintenance costs by automating site surveys and using infrastructure-based controls to optimize the performance of WiFi clients in real-time. It controls WiFi client’s interaction in variety of settings, and ensures that data, voice, and video applications have sufficient network resources to operate properly. The result is a better wireless experience for faculty and students alike.

 

“802.11n clients and infrastructure simply work better with ARM because it overcomes everyday impediments commonly found in a university setting,” said Hiromi Komiya, Aruba’s managing director for Japan.

 

He said that ARM improves the performance of newer 802.11n laptops operating in close proximity with older 802.11a/b/g devices, a situation commonly found in lecture halls. ARM will also automatically shift students’ 802.11n-capable laptops into the quieter 5GHz band where they can run faster than in the noisy 2.4GHz band.

 

Recent tests demonstrated that ARM can boost 802.11n performance by over 200 percent, without any changes or software additions to the client devices.

 

Hiromi Komiya said, “Results like this are what make Aruba’s 802.11n solution so compelling to customers like the University of Tokyo.”

 

California-based Aruba Networks (News - Alert) also offers centralized multi-vendor network management, unified mobility solutions that include WiFi networks, identity-based security, remote access and cellular services.