Case Study: Swisscom (Switzerland’s leading telecom) achieves secure, scalable Internet access for 5,600+ schools with F5 Networks

Swisscom Provides Safe Internet Access to Schools Using F5 Solutions

Swisscom, Switzerland’s leading telecom provider, launched a project to give free Internet access to all primary and secondary schools—over 5,000 sites and some 900,000 pupils and teachers—and needed best‑in‑class load balancing, URL filtering, proxy management and security while allowing each canton to set its own content policies. To meet those requirements Swisscom engaged F5 Networks, deploying F5 VIPRION chassis and F5 BIG‑IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) application delivery controllers to provide the required performance, reliability and flexibility.

F5 Networks’ VIPRION and BIG‑IP LTM (implemented with partner eXecure) delivered cookie persistence, VIP‑based load balancing to Blue Coat proxies and ICAP‑based integration with McAfee Web Gateway, and were scaled to 10 Gbps as traffic exceeded initial estimates. The solution enabled Swisscom to connect more than 5,600 schools, support roughly 100,000 concurrent users (with peak throughput over 2 Gbps and traffic spikes ~200% above forecasts), centralize about 30 filtering policies, and provide a stable, scalable platform that can be expanded simply by adding blades.

Swisscom

Martin Theiler

Project Management and Engineering