Case Study: University of Minnesota Duluth achieves reliable, scalable campus Wi‑Fi connecting 115,000+ devices daily with HPE Aruba Networking

University of Minnesota provides mobile experiences with Wi-Fi that connects 115,000+ devices daily

The University of Minnesota, an R1 public research system serving 66,000 students across five regional campuses and tens of thousands of staff, needed a reliable, secure, always‑on wireless network to support hybrid learning, classroom apps, thousands of daily users and a rapid growth in IoT devices across 28,000 acres and 30 satellite facilities. The challenge was to deliver high‑performance Wi‑Fi at scale while centralizing management, tightening access controls, and providing analytics to proactively monitor hundreds of thousands of connections.

By standardizing on Aruba — deploying over 10,000 indoor and outdoor APs with ArubaOS 8 plus ClearPass, AirWave and NetSight — the university achieved centralized, role‑based security and AI‑driven analytics. The network now sustains about 120K unique users (100K+ daily device connections, 75TB traffic), enabled a 1,700% increase in IoT connections, supports large‑scale online testing, reduces IT workload, eliminates planned outages, and provides real‑time device‑traffic mapping to track usage trends.

University of Minnesota Duluth

Louis Hammond

Service Owner, Voice and Data Network Services