Case Study: Western Sydney University achieves reliable, campus-wide high-density Wi‑Fi with RUCKUS Networks

Ruckus 802.11ac Wave 2 Provides Home-Away-From-Home Wi-Fi Access

Western Sydney University, serving 43,000 students and 5,000 staff across eight campuses and more than 550 buildings, faced an increasingly unreliable legacy Wi‑Fi that couldn’t meet high‑density, media‑rich learning needs or provide campus‑wide mobility and simple secure onboarding. With 12–15K concurrent users typical and plans to support far greater device density, the university needed a scalable, robust WLAN to eliminate connectivity complaints and support modern digital teaching.

Working with partner BigAir, WSU deployed Ruckus 802.11ac Wave 2 access points (R710, R510, T710) with P300 bridges and virtual SmartZone management, leveraging BeamFlex RF optimization plus SPoT and SmartCell Insight for analytics. The upgrade delivered significantly better coverage and reliability, a 30–40% rise in connections, vastly increased capacity (vSZ scales to hundreds of thousands of devices), and higher student satisfaction, with Cloudpath planned to add further security.

Western Sydney University

Kerry Holling

Chief Information and Digital Officer