No matter how many devices they have and no matter where they are on campus, students, faculty and staff expect to be connected to a wireless network. That connectivity is not just for hooking up gaming consoles and browsing TikTok, it’s also essential for modern teaching and learning. Universities must provide necessary resources and information in an increasingly remote world.
Connectivity is a near-constant battle, especially at larger institutions such as Oregon State University, which has 120 buildings on its main campus. To ensure connectivity, OSU performs all three types of site surveys — active, passive and predictive — with help from trusted tech partners and vendors.
Here’s an inside look at how they put it all together.
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OSU’s Site Surveys Look Everywhere for Connectivity
OSU partnered with Ekahau to conduct predictive surveys, which include importing floor plans from computer-aided design or Bluebeam files, says Johan Reinalda, director of network and telecom at OSU.
“If we know more about the type of walls, whether they are wood or drywall or masonry, that gives us the option to then figure out how signals will be attenuated in those areas,” Reinalda says. “Then we look at the capacity that we expect to be in those rooms.”
For its network infrastructure, OSU uses HPE Aruba. Predictive site surveys are submitted to the architects or construction company performing remodeling. The architects or construction company may ask for a beam to be moved if it is hindering a wireless signal.
The university only uses active site surveys post-installation or for troubleshooting. Reinalda conducts active site surveys by putting a radio on a tripod or hanging it from the ceiling in a building where the school needs to increase coverage. The active site survey helps verify the attributes of the building. After construction is completed, OSU conducts a predictive site survey using Ekahau.
An example of an active site survey at OSU would be troubleshooting a connectivity issue in an area such as a corner office that is on the edge of radio coverage, Reinalda says. Network engineers would simulate connectivity during an active site survey.
“We can walk around in the building to see if the expected design is actually what we are seeing in the real-life building,” he says.
Passive surveys are used both indoors and outdoors.
“We tend to have a reasonable amount of outdoor Wi-Fi coverage near the bigger buildings,” Reinalda says. However, budgeting limits where the school can use passive site surveys, so they are only conducted when a new building has been built.
“We don’t have the budget to put passive devices in the Wi-Fi network everywhere,” says Reinalda. “We mostly rely on user reporting and the ability of the radios themselves to tell us if they have a lot of retries, a lot of packet loss between the clients and them. Our central management pane will alert us to that, and you can see the status of individual APs and whether they’re red, yellow or green.”
The equipment used as part of passive surveys to listen in on radio signals is very expensive, Reinalda says.
“When you have to have 6,000 radios, you probably need a large quantity of these passive units also, so we rely on the radios to tell us if something is going on,” Reinalda says.
As part of a passive site survey, “we have some tools that you can walk through a building, and it measures the signal strength, and that’s tied into our design software. So, we do a passive round after our design has been installed,” he says.
With the data gleaned from wireless site surveys, universities will be able to keep connectivity reliable and stable for faculty and students.
As Rosalie Bibona, director of wireless product management at Extreme Networks, says, “The No. 1 most important thing at a school is connectivity.”
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