Case Study: Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District achieves half‑million simultaneous BYOT connections with HPE Aruba Networking

Aruba Gigabit Wi-Fi scales to enable a half-million simultaneous connections for school & community

Cypress‑Fairbanks Independent School District, serving about 114,000 students and 14,000 staff across 87 campuses and roughly 238 square miles, faced the challenge of providing secure, high‑density Wi‑Fi across 15 million square feet to support a BYOT environment and scale to as many as a half‑million simultaneous connections while simplifying device and policy management.

Working with partner Layer 3, the district deployed Aruba Gigabit Wi‑Fi (802.11ac) with ~7,800 indoor and ~400 outdoor APs, 7200 Series Mobility Controllers, Aruba ClearPass for policy/security and AirWave for network management. The rollout delivered a roughly 10x increase in education‑related connections, secure guest segregation and streamlined administration, and now reliably supports personalized, virtual and blended learning plus large community events (deployment eligible for E‑rate funding).

Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District

Frankie Jackson

Chief Technology Officer