Case Study: City College of San Francisco achieves scalable, cost-effective campus Wi-Fi for 90,000+ students with Cisco Meraki

Scaling the network across locations to meet higher demand while controlling costs

City College of San Francisco, a multi‑campus community college serving more than 90,000 students across nine campuses, needed to scale wireless access to meet rapidly growing BYOD and high‑density demand (roughly 50% traffic growth over three years) while keeping costs and staff overhead low. To meet this challenge, CCSF selected Cisco Meraki cloud‑managed Wireless LAN access points and dashboard management.

Cisco Meraki deployed APs campus‑wide in about three weeks using pre‑provisioning in the cloud, Active Directory integration, built‑in firewall controls and temporary SSIDs for events, eliminating the need for on‑site controllers and separate maintenance contracts. The Meraki solution reduced IT management time for CCSF’s small networking team, delivered greater visibility and reliability, supports thousands of simultaneous clients transferring over 100 GB daily, and provides a cost‑effective, easily scalable Wi‑Fi platform.

City College of San Francisco

Tim Ryan

Technical Operations Manager