Student Housing Developer Deploys Ruckus Wi-Fi

Education Realty Trust (EDR), a real estate investment trust that owns, develops and manages collegiate housing, will use Ruckus Wireless’ Smart Wi-Fi products and technology to bring wireless broadband access to approximately 20,000 college students living in more than 30 of its collegiate housing properties across the United States.

"Our residents are some of the heaviest Internet users, and their bandwidth consumption is high – both day and night," said Scott Casey, VP of IT for EDR, in a statement. "With the increasing number of iPhones, iPads and other devices we are now seeing, high-speed access to the Internet throughout the property has become the number-one amenity they request from us – they indicate that it’s even more important to them than air conditioning."

EDR chose the Ruckus Wireless ZoneFlex Smart Wireless LAN (WLAN) system. To cover an initial 17 properties, the EDR system will rely on over 1,200 ZoneFlex 7363 dual-band 802.11n access points (APs), as well as one ZoneDirector controller for each site. Each Ruckus AP supports from three to five units with the goal of delivering 10 Mbps constant bit rate performance per client device. In places where fiber is unavailable, the APs are configured with Ruckus’ Smart Meshing technology to deliver the same range and performance as wired APs.

To oversee the entire network, Pavlov Media is providing complete systems integration and managed services for both the wired and wireless infrastructure. Pavlov provides service level agreement (SLAs) as well as network operations support to EDR.