Case Study: Chicago Architecture Foundation achieves increased capacity, uptime, and performance with Cisco Meraki

How centralized WiFi and smart links increased capacity, uptime, and performance

The Chicago Architecture Foundation, a nonprofit housed in the Santa Fe Building serving staff, hundreds of volunteers, and nearly 488,000 annual visitors, needed a reliable, easy-to-manage network to support guest Wi‑Fi, growing device counts, and higher availability. Before Cisco Meraki, CAF used individually managed APs and a mix of switches, which limited coverage, seamless roaming, centralized device management, and WAN uptime.

Cisco Meraki deployed cloud-managed MR access points, an MX security appliance to smart-link two ISPs, Systems Manager for MDM, and MS switches. The Meraki solution delivered centrally managed Wi‑Fi with seamless roaming, smart link bonding that increased capacity and WAN uptime, automatic repeater fallback to avoid outages, and zero‑touch switch deployment — improving performance and reliability while saving time and money for CAF.

Chicago Architecture Foundation

Andrew Ruginis

Director of IT