Since its founding in 1935, the City College of San
Francisco has flourished into one of the largest community colleges in the
United States.  With over 90,000 students
across nine large campuses, the urban, multicultural academic institute embodies
the diversity of the bay area. And as the enrollment numbers continue to
increase at the multi-campus junior college, so do its networking needs.

Tim Ryan, who has been Manager of Technical
Operations at CCSF for over 10 years, has witnessed a dramatic shift in
students’ demand for Internet access. “All of our campuses are connected by a
fiber network that we share with the city, so teachers have had access for
years,” he said. “But now WiFi can extend that access to students. Students
want access in the libraries, they want to do research on their own devices. We
want students to be able to take advantage of our high-speed network
infrastructure.”

CCSF previously utilized a mix of wireless equipment from other vendors, but as students began bringing their own devices to campus
and wireless demand increased, Ryan recognized that a solution refresh was
necessary to handle peak traffic. “We’ve seen a 50% growth in traffic over the
past three years,” he explained. Meanwhile, with only five IT staff focused on
networking, Ryan needed a wireless solution that was easy to manage. “Everyone
here is doing multiple jobs. Support is a big challenge for us – we have to
minimize our staff’s time.”

Ryan and his team chose Meraki cloud-managed
wireless access points (APs) in response to CCSF’s request for proposals.
“Everyone was impressed by the simplicity and the user interface for the cloud
dashboard,” Ryan said. “And we liked that we wouldn’t have to maintain a
hardware controller on-site. We saw that Meraki was easy to set up and easy to
move around to meet our needs.”

CCSF was also working within a tight budget.
“Meraki was the most cost-effective solution,” Ryan said. “The firmware upgrades
are included, and there is no separate maintenance contract. This helps us to
reduce costs while increasing service, so that we can be more tech-forward.”

Deploying Meraki APs across multiple campuses took
only three weeks. Ryan prioritized wireless access in classrooms where teachers
requested it and in public areas, such as the library, cafeteria, and lobby, to
facilitate independent study. “With so many students bringing their own devices
to campus, we want to respond to academic need as well as the independent study
and entertainment aspect,” he explained. He also placed APs in
centrally-located telephone closets that already housed his Ethernet hardware. Deployment
was simplified by pre-populating APs in the web-based Meraki dashboard; when
the devices were installed they automatically authenticated and downloaded
their configuration from the cloud.

Meraki was the most cost-effective solution. The firmware upgrades are included, and there is no separate maintenance contract. This helps us to reduce costs while increasing service, so that we can be more tech-forward.Tim Ryan, Manager of Technical Operations

To make it easy for the students to get online securely
and minimize support incidents, Ryan utilized Meraki’s native Active Directory
integration, enabling students to authenticate against CCSF’s AD environment via
a splash page. Meanwhile, Meraki’s built-in firewall prevents unwanted wireless
access to secure network resources. For special events like football games and
career fairs, Ryan creates a temporary SSID that does not require
authentication. “We really like the flexibility and adaptability of Meraki to
meet our needs,” Ryan said.

Now Ryan’s small IT Team supports thousands of
clients who often transfer over 100 GB each day. “The cloud management is
saving us a lot of time,” Ryan said. “Before, we had to apply patches to the
controller, and now we are free from that. The APs are very reliable. We get
email alerts if anything goes down or there is a configuration change.”

The Meraki dashboard also provides much-needed
visibility into the network. “Our staff is so small, and our users so spread
out, we don’t have a help desk,” Ryan explained. “We rely on the dashboard to
evaluate user experience – the number of simultaneous users gives us an idea of
scale and demand for wireless.”

Naturally, demand is rising. Although City College has more
than 70 computer labs with over 2000 computers, it still struggles with a
shortage of devices. “Sometimes there are only 30 wired computers in a lab, so
if 10 students can bring laptops we can support everyone,” Ryan said. Ryan also
utilizes laptops on carts for new-student orientation and is offering these
carts for classroom use as well. “It takes a lot of infrastructure to put in a
new lab – it’s pretty expensive. If we can provide lab instruction using
laptops in a traditional classroom, we can support more users.” Ryan also noted
that, because Meraki’s cloud architecture does not have the artificial limits
of a traditional controller, new APs can always be added; many departments now
buy their own Meraki APs and add them to the network.

Ryan says he is always looking for new ways to
incorporate WiFi into learning environments. “We see a lot of streaming content
and YouTube, but we’re also shifting to online classes, and we use web
applications like Blackboard and Gmail and Moodle for everything,” he said. “I’m
interested to see how teachers change their instruction style to incorporate
wireless. At CCSF, we’re trying to serve every neighborhood and teach every
class, so it’s a very dynamic environment. I expect there will be a variety of
best practices.”