Australia's Largest University Connects with Xirrus Wi-Fi Arrays

THOUSAND OAKS, Calif., April 27 /PRNewswire/ -- Xirrus®, the Wi-Fi "Power Play" that delivers the most coverage, bandwidth, and user density in the industry, announced today the deployment of Wi-Fi Arrays at Monash University campuses in Victoria, Australia.

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Monash University is Australia's largest university with 58,000 students and 17,000 staff and is spread across eight campuses around the world, including six in Victoria, Australia, one in Malaysia, and one in South Africa along with a research centre in Prato, Italy and a graduate research school in India.  

Monash University selected Xirrus to deploy high performance, high bandwidth Wi-Fi into an initial 32 learning spaces across Monash University's Clayton, Caulfield, Peninsula, and Gippsland campuses as part of the eEducation Centre's initiative to bring collaborative education into large learning spaces.

"Today's students are highly social and digitally connected learners," said Nathan Bailey, Associate Director, eEducation Centre at Monash University.  "They are used to highly interactive real-time collaboration. Monash University's MeTL software enables shared learning experiences between the instructor and student as well as between student subgroups."

"Our initial testing was performed in a wired learning 'test' area; however, it was evident that deploying hardware to cable all the learning areas would be very costly and disruptive," continued Nathan.  "Wi-Fi and specifically 802.11n was identified as an ideal solution, if it could provide adequate performance and reliability."

Nathan concluded by saying, "We were in need of a high bandwidth Wi-Fi solution that could support hundreds of tablet and laptop computers in the same room, multiplied dozens of times across our eight campuses and only Xirrus was able to meet our criteria, which included high performance, technical expertise, support, scalability, sustainability, and environmental impact."

Test Methodology:

• Client: 100 Dell® and HP® tablet computers running Microsoft® Windows® 7
• Wi-Fi Adapter: Intel® WiFi Link 5100 adapters
• Applications:
  • MeTL (Monash University)
  • Classroom Presenter 3 (University of Washington)
• Tests:
  • Simultaneously download a 3GB ISO on all 100 clients
  • Simultaneously run MeTL on all 100 clients
  • Simultaneously run Classroom Presenter 3 on all 100 clients

"The Xirrus Wi-Fi Array was made for what we are trying to accomplish," said Chris Hagan, Lead Developer for MeTL and Monash University's eEducation Centre Software Manager. "With three Xirrus Arrays, we can have 100 students collaborating with text, digital ink and images with as much as 7Mbps each. This ensures they can actively participate in our crowdsourcing approach without being inhibited by the technology.

"At one point during our testing, we emulated 900 MeTL users across three Xirrus Arrays and still had plenty of headroom -- this gave us the confidence to move ahead with a fully wireless solution," Chris continued.

"It's great to have an innovative and powerful product solution for our clients," said Mark Winter, Managing Director at inTechnology.  "Through independent testing and customer feedback, Xirrus is clearly the leader in high performance and high bandwidth Wi-Fi.  They are very focused on delivering the best Quality of Service for customers and are willing to go the distance to ensure client success -- this project is on schedule and budget, which is a great thing!"

"Wi-Fi will be the primary network connection in the foreseeable future and support for dense user and device environments will be an absolute necessity," said John DiGiovanni, Area Vice President at Xirrus. "Monash University's test results further validate that the fully distributed, dense radio architecture of Xirrus is the only Wi-Fi offering capable of delivering on that promise today."

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About Xirrus

Xirrus, the only Wi-Fi Power Play™, manufactures the Wi-Fi Array® architecture that displaces both overlay Wi-Fi offerings and switched Ethernet or Fast Ethernet to the desktop. Unlike traditional access points, the Wi-Fi Array integrates 4, 8, 12, 16 or 24 802.11abgn radios along with a high-gain directional antenna system, onboard multi-gigabit switch, Wi-Fi controller, firewall, dedicated Wi-Fi threat sensor, and an embedded spectrum analyzer into a single energy-efficient and cost-effective device using 75% fewer devices, cabling, switch ports, power, space, and installation time compared with any other offering.  Xirrus products are designed and manufactured in the United States.  Xirrus is Wi-Fi Alliance Verisign, PCI, FIPS 140-2, and ISO 9001:2008 Certified. For more information, please visit http://www.xirrus.com.

Follow us at twitter.com/xirrus, facebook.com/xirrus, and youtube.com/xirrustv.

About MeTL

Monash MeTL is the pioneering software being developed by the eEducation Centre team at Monash University. This technology transforms the lecture into an interactive experience for both the lecturer and the student, moving it away from the traditional 'information transfer' model to an open 'information sharing' model.  Students become the focus of the learning activity, collaborating and sharing ideas from each other as the lecturer facilitates the learning event. This change in pedagogy allows for greater student engagement in lectures.

MeTL takes advantage of the inking capabilities of the tablet PC, enabling simultaneous collaboration with PowerPoint slides, images and text. In addition to in-class collaboration, students can continue the learning conversation after the lecture finishes. The resulting conversation becomes a collaborative learning object capturing the full experience of the lecture and all the associated learning that it generates with students (links to external comments, notes, shared annotations, etc.)

About Monash University and the eEducation Centre

Monash University is Australia's largest university with 58,000 students and over 17,000 staff. The research-intensive University is a member of Australia's Group of Eight and has a strong international focus, with campuses in Malaysia and South Africa, a graduate school in India and a research and teaching centre in Italy.

The prestigious Times Higher Education Supplement consistently ranks Monash University in the top 50 universities in the world.

The eEducation Centre has been founded under the umbrella of the Education Portfolio in order to establish Monash University as a clear national leader in innovative and effective learning, teaching and collaboration technologies.

The eEducation Centre draws together the streams of pedagogy, technology and space to support rich and more integrated teaching approaches.  We are focused on changing the environment in ways that save time (efficiency) and improve leverage (effectiveness) in learning and teaching.

Through the pursuit of a number of projects which increase the presence of specialised software, technology and innovative design at Monash, we aim to empower students and staff to engage with their subject matter and their peers in a collaborative, persistent and flexible learning environment.  For more information, please visit www.monash.edu.

Follow us at twitter.com/xirrus, facebook.com/xirrus, and youtube.com/xirrustv.

SOURCE Xirrus