PRIVATE NEWORK OPTIONS FOR EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS

02 June 20

Want to learn more about Private Wireless Networks to Support the Education Sectors ?

This article outlines the considerations that should be taken into account when deciding if a Private Wireless Network is suitable for your company’s business and for any possible Education facility requirement, the document is written by industry thought-leader Dr Mike Hamer of Kaleidoscope Service Solutions International Limited?

Education is an enormously important sector. It generates around $2 billion in revenues globally, employing an estimated 12 million people across 50-100,000 sites around the world. The industry has some of the most demanding requirements for communications networks of any industry vertical.

This article outlines the challenges, market drivers, use cases and trends for Private Wireless Networks to support the Global Education needs for secure connectivity.

Who is Kaleidoscope Service Solutions International Limited ?

The KSSI senior leadership team has over 100 years of knowledge from around the world by working for numerous Governments, Institutions, Mobile Network Operators, Infrastructure Providers and Telecommunications Vendors, delivering both Private 4G and 5G Networks. KSSI’s ethos is to deliver solutions that are ultra-secure and have minimal environmental impact whilst maintaining cost-efficiencies. ?

KSSI are in a strong position to support all Educational Facilities Globally by ensuring that maximum benefit is realized with Private 5G, be it from a strategic perspective (business consulting, business planning) or for design, planning and implementation and Operation.

What Is a Smart Campus?

A smart campus uses technology to create a digital environment that improves the experience of students and staff. ?This technology can provide features such as adding value to classrooms with self-service technology, directing visitors to open parking spaces, offering virtual health appointments, and kiosks for food services.

But the value of smart campuses goes well beyond simple quality of life improvements. As campuses grow to support tens of thousands of staff and students, staff are tasked with managing network access, public safety systems, and maintenance requests on the scale of a small town.

Smart campus technology can improve these systems through centralized control, which enables better scalability, enhanced data visibility, and cost savings through automation and simplified management.

Before we explore the use cases and benefits of a smart campus, let’s first touch on the backbone of a smart campus and how it works.

How Does a Smart Campus Work?

A smart campus leverages Wi-Fi and/or 5G technology to provide blanket coverage over an entire campus to support the IoT sensors that enable campus services and applications.

Colleges often leverage?private 5G?to adequately support the coverage of very large outdoor areas across many buildings throughout the campus. Unlike commercial carriers, private mobile networks are owned by the campus and controlled by the IT department, or the support System Integrator. 5G wireless technology works well for this task since its per access point coverage allows for a wider range, especially across outdoor areas. Since private 5G networks use a different spectrum than Wi-Fi, both networks can coexist on campus without interference.

Unlike other wireless technologies, private 5G networks can also reliably support connected devices with seamless handover when they are mobile. This means when a device switches from one 5G base station to another, the user’s device’s connection remains strong. This is vital for supporting technologies such as connected vehicles, remote controlled robotics, and public safety / police services.

Small IoT sensors?can use the same network to share information about their environment in real time. For example, maintenance can use IoT sensors to monitor for air conditioning failure, while students can use similar sensors to know when a washer is free at the campus laundromat.

This helps administrators reduce their costs and downtime while providing students with unique services and reliable access to resources anywhere on campus.

The biggest difference between a smart campus and a traditional campus is that smart campuses collect device and environmental data to enrich the lives of staff and students. On a traditional campus, not all devices are online, and the ones that are often don’t share information with each other. This creates silos of lost data that could otherwise be used to improve campus conditions.

With the basics covered, let’s dive into the basic Technological differences between the current solutions being adopted and the advantages / disadvantages of each.

What is 5G

5G networks will provide 50x more speed, 10x less latency, and 1,000x more capacity than 4G. This means 5G will be able to connect more devices and transmit more data than ever before, delivering fast connectivity and significantly enhanced user experiences. As with 4G, mobile carriers may offer subscriptions to their 5G network, which requires 5G-capable devices, however in a Private 5G environment there may not be a requirement for a subscription, this is left to the discretion of the University

What Is Wi-Fi 6?

Wi-Fi 6, based on the IEEE 802.11ax standard, will deliver 4x higher capacity and 75 percent lower latency, offering nearly triple the speed of its predecessor, Wi-Fi 5

Anyone can operate a Wi-Fi network—and most of us have one in our homes and offices, connected to broadband service. Wi-Fi 6 devices require a Wi-Fi 6?compliant access point to get the full speed, latency, and capacity improvements.

How Do 5G and Wi-Fi Complement Each Other?

Wi-Fi and 5G offer complementary functionalities. Where the user experience is concerned, 5G and Wi-Fi 6 can both achieve gigabit speeds and low latency.

Because Wi-Fi has a lower cost to deploy, maintain, and scale—especially where access points need to serve more users—it will continue to be the predominant technology for home and business environments. This provides great support for dozens of data-hungry devices, like PCs, tablets, smartphones, streaming devices, TV sets, and printers, which must all connect to the network. Thanks to its longer range, 5G will be used for mobile connections, like smartphones. It will also be used for connected cars, smart city deployments, and even for large manufacturing operations.

The two technologies handle network management differently. Wi-Fi uses unlicensed spectrum, so you and your whole neighborhood can each have your own Wi-Fi network without getting a license to use it. However, this can mean your Wi-Fi performance is impacted by how many neighbors are using their network at the same time and on the same channel as you. When used in offices and other enterprise environments, Wi-Fi tends to be heavily managed to meet a desired performance goal.

5G and LTE networks typically are managed by operators and use a dedicated, licensed spectrum that requires subscription fees to access. As with LTE, 5G performance will depend on how many “bars” you have—in other words, how close you are to a base station—and how many other people are using the network.

Of course, there are exceptions to these generalizations. At the end of the day, whether to use 5G or Wi-Fi 6 depends on the specific use case.

As Wi-Fi and cellular wireless technologies continue to evolve in parallel, the core networks that are the backbone for all Internet connectivity are transforming as well. This process is known as cloudification since it extends the use of data center technologies from the cloud into the network. Cloudification lays the foundation for carriers to support the growing volumes of data and billions of connected nodes that enable new use cases.

These network technologies—when working together — are the key to the future of 5G: ?Wi-Fi 6 and 5G bring next-level, seamless functionality to the wireless world.

Wi-Fi 6 and 5G for Home Networking

5G offers such an enormous boost in performance, service providers can offer consumers another choice in bringing broadband connectivity to the home: wireless broadband through 5G. In this area, 5G will compete with cable or fiber offerings.

However, Wi-Fi will remain the most efficient way to connect the growing number of devices throughout the home, including PCs, tablets, smartphones, smart speakers, home security cameras, thermostats, and appliances.

5G Powering the Future of IoT

Some of the most exciting applications for 5G and Wi-Fi 6 will involve the?Internet of Things (IoT). Businesses can choose which wireless technology makes the most sense for their needs and still get the high capacity, fast speed, and low latency they need to ensure devices can share data quickly and more reliably.

For example, machine-to-machine communication plays a key role in factory automation. While Wi-Fi 6 may work for a managed manufacturing operation, 5G may augment a large, campus-wide environment.

In some cases, Wi-Fi and 5G may be used simultaneously. For instance, a connected car may offer in-vehicle Wi-Fi for users’ devices, while the car itself connects to a 5G cellular network.

KSSI Plans Your Private 5G Network

Planning your network allows you to reliably meet your performance, coverage, and capacity demands the first time around. KSSI will use collected network data to estimate demand and perform site surveys around the campus to determine what (if any) additional hardware may be required.?

The?KSSI Network Planning administrators will use our proprietary Software tools to quickly estimate the hardware, spectrum availability, coverage, and performance requirements. The tool uses your campus geolocation to give you the most accurate look at your network needs.

Set Your Service Levels

With a private 5G network, smart campuses can dynamically manage highly specific service-level objectives for bandwidth and latency performance of critical use cases. This is similiar to how Wi-Fi handles quality of service but at a deterministic level for application performance and availability.

This step will vary depending on the private 5G solution you choose. The KSSI’s 5G HANC (Hosted Access Network Cloud) solution takes a unique approach by providing enterprise-level reliability. This essentially allows KSSI to set application specific QoS targets that match exact throughput and latency requirements.

These targets are continuously enforced to reflect the rules you set, even during peak network usage. This same back-end platforms also enable smart campuses to gain insights from IoT sensors and orchestrate device management.

Designing Your Campus for the Future with KSSI

Within a KSSI 5G HANC, 5G wireless access points can be quickly deployed throughout university campuses as plug-n-play and be managed centrally via our cloud-based operations.

A KSSI 5G HANC ensures that device group or application specific service level objectives on critical applications, such as throughput and latency requirements, are consistently met.?

KSSI’s industry-first approach enables university information and facility technology teams to build their own private 5G networks as a seamless?turnkey solution. With a KSSI 5G HANC, out of the box experience is drastically simplified, operations across a large network can be performed at scale, and onboarding can be done alongside existing wireless and IT infrastructure, without interrupting business operations.

Why Private Networks? From the University’s perspective

Provision of a Private 5G network, with the speeds on offer along with low latency, is critical when certain types of services are planned to be offered by the University to the end users, i.e.

a.???? Financial services

b.??? Personal data Transfer services

c.???? Mobility based services

d.??? Mission Critical University services

e.???? Video services

f.????? On-line lesson/lecture access

A Private 5G network will also mitigate reliability & availability issues of existing Wi-Fi access affecting end user service

A Private 5G network also offers the ability to collect in-depth performance data for devices, users & traffic analysis.

Smart Campus Examples

Colleges around the world are quickly turning into smart campuses thanks to KSSI and our ubiquitous 5G solutions which can be implemented in a very short period. The following are examples of uses for Smart Campus environments:

1.???? The University of Illinois Chicago and the University of Kentucky use their smart campus network to power autonomous six-wheeled delivery robots (designed by the university) that deliver food and other goods directly to students at their dorms.

2.???? Over at San Jose State University, administrators integrate smart IoT devices into their maintenance, security, and student services.

Student Services

Smart campuses directly benefit the lives of students and can be a unique selling point for students looking to narrow down where they’ll attend college. This is especially true for larger universities with on-campus dorms and shared student spaces.

A few popular smart campus services include the following:

·?????? Sensors that track and schedule shared spaces for students.

·?????? Autonomous transportation and delivery robots.

·?????? Sensors that alert students when shared resources are free (computers, laundry, etc.).

·?????? Contactless payment methods.

·?????? Automated kiosks for food services.

As technology advances, students expect to have connectivity everywhere they go. Smart campuses will be able to deliver reliable campus-wide coverage and provide secure and personalized student services to stay competitive with other universities.

Classroom Analytics

Smart campuses can use room tracking sensors to monitor lecture hall availability, attendance, and student engagement. IoT sensors can share seat availability with students in real time via mobile app and help foster social distancing guidelines through room scheduling and space management.

Smart campus classroom services also offer ?the following:

·?????? Space optimization for social distancing.

·?????? Capacity planning data for future campus expansions.

·?????? Shared space tracking.

·?????? Room scheduling.

·?????? Enrollment tracking.

·?????? Identifying at-risk students through automated attendance and participation tracking.

Smart campus classroom analytics provides administrators with powerful insights that help keep students safe, provide insights into growth, and prevent at-risk students from dropping out.

Safety And Security

Inter-connected sensors, smart locks, and location intelligence platforms are making smart campuses safer than ever before. Security personnel can use IoT technology to reduce crime across campus and improve their emergency broadcast systems.

A few key security services include;

·?????? Motion and environmental sensors for sensitive areas

·?????? Geofencing and smart locks for improved access control between students and staff

·?????? SIM provisioning for secure and reliable communication across the 5G network

·?????? Digital signs and speakers for emergency alerts

·?????? High-definition low-latency video monitoring

·?????? Automated lighting across campus

Universities are improving student safety by giving security teams a deeper understanding of what’s happening across campus. These insights, combined with intelligent access control, keep students safe while allowing easy access to areas for staff members.

Reducing Operational Costs

Smart campuses can greatly reduce operational costs through improved efficiency and proactive maintenance. Maintenance staff can rely on IoT sensors to indicate when machines need maintenance or proactive replacement.?

This helps campuses operate at the highest level of efficiency with reduced downtime. Automation also plays a key role in orchestrating lighting, heating, and cooling in HVAC systems for significant cost savings.

Reduced operational costs include the following:

·?????? Avoiding downtime due to unforeseen machine failures.

·?????? Improved HVAC efficiency through environmental sensors and automation.

·?????? Improved efficiency of maintenance staff with advanced remote troubleshooting.

How to Setup a Smart Campus

A traditional campus doesn’t become smart overnight. Designing a network, building back-end infrastructure, and designing management platforms can be daunting for University IT departments. Many universities partner with KSSI to help plan, design, and implement their smart campus deployments. No matter which routes you choose, keep these steps in mind when designing your smart campus:?

Start with a Goal in Mind

Administrators should start with an overarching goal they wish to achieve by integrating IoT into their campus. Whether it be improving student safety or reducing operational costs, starting with a single goal will keep the project on task during its early stages.

Ask yourself what information you’ll need to collect to achieve your goal. This narrows down what sensors and platforms you’ll use. Make a note of what areas of the campus you’ll need to monitor to achieve your goal. For example, an emergency broadcast system needs to reliably cover the entire campus.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that a Private 5G Network offers significant benefits over Wi-Fi Only solution for campus enterprise services from a security, control, and performance data perspective, as well as control over new services release. The key differentiators and benefits are:

·?????? Secure and Private Communications for all

·?????? Sufficient Access Security (enhanced with the introduction of the Private APN’s)

·?????? Coverage where required, including in-building coverage of all buildings

·?????? Connectivity demands to University Campus users

·?????? Throughput speeds sufficient to meet the Universities applications demands, always, especially for any mission critical service offerings carried through the Private APN’s

·?????? Uninterrupted service, i.e., High reliability Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) to meet the Universities end user targets

·?????? QoS guarantees in the event of network congestion

Disclaimer

Whilst this article is based on information from sources which are considered reliable, no representation or warranty, express or implied, is made or given by or on behalf of the KSSI, any of its directors, or any other person about the accuracy, completeness or fairness of the information or opinions contained in this article and no responsibility or liability is accepted by any of them for that information or those opinions or for any errors, omissions, misstatements (negligent or otherwise) or for any communication written or otherwise, contained or referred to in this article.

Accordingly, neither the KSSI nor any of its directors, officers, employees, advisers, associated persons or subsidiary undertakings are liable for any direct, indirect or consequential loss or damage suffered by any person as a result of relying upon any statement in, or as a result of any admission in, this document or any article supplied with this presentation, or by any future communications in connection with those articles and all of those liabilities, losses and damages are expressly disclaimed

Any opinions expressed reflect KSSI’s position at the date of this article and are subject to change.