Purdue University

Key stats

• Wi-Fi uptime improved from 77% to over 99%
• IT support tickets reduced by 80%
• Wi-Fi network speeds quadrupled

Overview

Purdue University is a U.S. public institution of higher education that serves more than 70,000 undergraduate and graduate students across three campuses in Indiana, plus 30,000 additional students in remote locations and online across the globe. Purdue has been credited as one of the top ten most-recognized institutions in the world. Contributing to its renown, no doubt, is that the university has not raised tuition costs in 13 years.

Purdue was also recognized as one the Top 50 Most Innovative Companies in the world (in sixteenth place) by Fast Company for the university’s work in the semiconductors field. Purdue was the only university to make this prestigious list. Despite the innovations coming out of its labs and classrooms, the technologies that powered Purdue’s campus IT infrastructure were not quite as advanced. Campus Wi-Fi experienced frequent performance and reliability issues that often didn’t meet the expectations of students, faculty, and staff.

This network upgrade enabled us to streamline some of our capabilities, reduce the amount of touch time that’s required on the backbone, allowed us to focus on broader objectives, and deliver new capabilities for students, faculty, and staff.

Ian Hyatt

Chief Information Officer and Vice President for Information Technology, Purdue University

Challenge

Uptime for the university’s campus-wide Wi-Fi network was only about 77%. Older equipment (such as 802.11n access points) meant there wasn’t enough bandwidth to meet the daily demand of about 100,000 unique devices. And issues with the university’s convoluted multi-factor authentication system—supporting roughly 4.6 million logins daily—resulted in 23% of all calls to the help desk.

Connectivity is a top need for many. For students away at college, it allows them to stay connected to home life, school life, and of course, their schoolwork. “If they experience any slowness, or they’re unable to access the things they need to do, it’s very frustrating for students,” explained Ian Hyatt, Chief Information Officer and Vice President for Information Technology for Purdue University.

This difficulty in providing reliable connectivity meant that Purdue’s IT department was unable to satisfy its mission to “support teaching and learning, enhance research, and enable faculty and staff to achieve their objectives while providing a positive student experience.” As a result, students, faculty, and staff had diminished expectations of campus connectivity. In fact, students’ frustrations with the Wi-Fi network were so palpable that discussion about it became the top trending topic related to the university on Reddit.

Solution

To successfully address these issues and deliver on its mission, Purdue’s IT staff sought to shift their way of thinking from “just keeping the lights on” to a mindset of “delivering an essential, high-quality service.” This would include a sizeable investment in new equipment and services, as well as updates to operational processes and procedures.

The university partnered with Cisco to help execute a five-year deployment plan that would transform and unify Purdue’s networking infrastructure with 12,750 Meraki Wi-Fi 6 and 6E wireless access points across the university’s West Lafayette, Northwest, and Fort Wayne campuses. The project would also streamline Purdue’s deployment of the Cisco Duo multi-factor authentication system to deliver greater security and ease of use, integrate Splash Access for a more robust and intuitive Wi-Fi login and self-management portal, and utilize Splunk for end-to-end network monitoring, increased security, and faster disaster recovery.

The first phase of the five-year project focused on overhauling the Wi-Fi experience for the approximately 16,000 students living in residence halls on the West Lafayette campus. To keep things moving swiftly, Purdue performed the deployment during the academic term, while students were actively living in the residence halls—instead of waiting for a break between terms, when most students are away. The students were willing to deal with some disruption to their physical environment for the significant improvements to the Wi-Fi network they anticipated.

Over a three-month period, Purdue replaced 3,750 access points. In the following months, Purdue deployed an additional 2,600 access points in the West Lafayette campus’s academic spaces and another 725 access points at Purdue Northwest academic spaces and residence halls. “The journey has been incredible,” stated Hyatt. “Cisco provided us with terrific solutions and was able to pivot when there were pandemic-related challenges like supply chain issues and other things.”

The journey has been incredible. Cisco provided us with terrific solutions and was able to pivot when there were challenges like supply chain issues and other things.

Ian Hyatt

Chief Information Officer and Vice President for Information Technology, Purdue University

Results

Improvements were immediately obvious. The Wi-Fi network’s uptime was now over 99%. Network speeds quadrupled. “The speeds are far beyond anything students ever had in the past at Purdue,” explained Hyatt. Even with each student possessing an average of five connected devices, the network was not oversaturated.

The student experience of connecting to the network and managing personal devices was also elevated with the integration of Splash Access. Students could now expect the same level of seamless connectivity—ease of connection, always available, and high-throughput capabilities—that they typically experience at home. With that in mind, Purdue branded the new network portal as “URHOME” (the “UR” standing for “university residence”).

Students can now easily connect their multiple devices—such as smart devices, gaming consoles, printers, and media streaming players (and even grant visitors temporary access)—to their own domain space using a single pre-shared access key. “It’s actually been an amazing transformation that we’ve gone through in the residence halls with the new solutions that have been deployed,” said Hyatt. “It’s making students’ lives easier with their personal events, activities, gaming, and streaming, all easily accessible now. It’s helping them in their studies and their ability to reach the network for the things they need to be successful.”

With the simplification of device onboarding and streamlining of multi-factor authentication using Cisco Duo, Purdue IT was seeing results quickly. For instance, during the Boiler Gold Rush welcome week, support tickets were down over 80% compared to the prior year. The average service desk wait time dropped from 3 minutes and 33 seconds to 1 minute and 7 seconds. “Cisco’s security and networking solutions work well together,” said Hyatt. “It doesn’t create noise or slow things down. It allows things to move at speed in a secure fashion.”

“Transparency in the network and the environment is a huge win for us because people are able to do what they need to do without having to think about whether or not it’s going to work, whether or not it’s going to be slow, or if it’s going to have a negative effect on their ability to accomplish their objectives,” said Hyatt. “At the end of the day, a seamless network and a transparent network to them is one that just works. With Cisco, it’s always on, it’s always there, and they can always count on it.”

The students were not the only ones to benefit from the recent upgrades; Purdue’s IT team also saw notable improvements to network operations. For instance, by using tools from Meraki and Splunk, the Purdue IT team gained increased visibility across the network and could more easily identify and address problems.

And while Purdue’s IT team chose to manage its new switching and campus wireless infrastructure with the Cisco Catalyst Center on-premises solution, they appreciated that they can later switch to cloud management with the Meraki dashboard when they are ready, without having to purchase any new hardware. “The automation, machine learning, and other capabilities we can make use of are going to help us reduce our exposure to unwanted network events—such as outages and security risks—and at the same time will give us a much more efficient operation in general terms,” according to Hyatt.

“Altogether, this all adds up to allowing students, faculty, and staff to be successful in teaching and learning, as well as in the research component that we are a very large part of,” said Hyatt. “It also gives us the ability to generate at speed new services and capabilities that were not part of our portfolio in the past.”

While Purdue is still in the midst of its five-year deployment plan, the IT team has already accomplished much to be proud of. “This network upgrade enabled us to streamline some of our capabilities, reduce the amount of touch time that’s required on the backbone, allowed us to focus on broader objectives, and deliver new capabilities for students, faculty, and staff,” stated Hyatt. “We’re particularly proud of the fact we have vastly improved our network operations, our system operations, and our reliability and resiliency. Our services are operating at historic highs in just the last two years.”