Case Study: University of Lausanne achieves campus-wide high-performance Wi-Fi with RUCKUS Networks

University of Lausanne 450 Centrally Managed Access Points Covering Three Sites

The University of Lausanne (UNIL), a public university spanning three sites (Dorigny, Bugnon and Epalinges) across 230 acres, needed to replace an aging, limited wireless setup with a secure, high‑performance campus Wi‑Fi that could scale with rapidly growing device use and traffic and become the standard connection for students and staff. After evaluating vendors, UNIL selected Ruckus for its distributed data forwarding, superior radio performance and long‑term partnership potential.

Ruckus deployed 450 access points (ZoneFlex 7962/7982) managed by a primary ZoneDirector 3500 controller with a redundant backup, plus four bridge pairs for resilience; all APs run on PoE. The network now covers almost the entire campus, carries over 60% of UNIL’s internet traffic (about 5 TB/day and 5,000+ simultaneous connections at peak), delivers reliable performance (including 100 Mbps over ~1 km via bridges), and has greatly reduced help‑desk demand while making Wi‑Fi the default access method.

University of Lausanne

Alexandra Frincu

Manager of the Wireless Infrastructure