Lynchburg College Provides Better, Smarter Internet for Students on Busy Campus WiFi Network
Lynchburg, VA, October 6, 2015 (Newswire.com) - Jeff Harris was wrestling with a growing problem facing higher education. As network administrator for Lynchburg College, he was seeing Internet traffic from dorm room and residence WiFi expand beyond control. Most of Lynchburg’s 2,800 students live on campus, carry multiple devices and remain connected to the Internet 24/7. A typical day will see up to 10,000 devices connected, all competing for finite bandwidth capacity with no reasonable means of distributing resources among students.
Lynchburg College upgraded bandwidth annually for the past three years at considerable expense. But demand far outpaced network capacity, creating Internet congestion and impacting the use and reliability of the campus network. The slow-down was especially severe from 9:00pm to 1:00am, when online study/work/play would flood the ResNet, resulting in poor quality of service and high support calls and complaints.
"The results from The Governor™ have been measurable, with service complaints virtually disappearing upon installation. Also important to us, ongoing management and upgrade configuration are not required, freeing up personnel resources and allowing for future upgrades."
Jeff Harris, Network Administrator
Mr. Harris noted that “Lynchburg students count on consistent, reliable Internet performance to study, search or just have fun.” He added that, “as a liberal arts institution, we do not want to interfere with their online intellectual pursuits, or inhibit them in any way.” Limiting a student’s access to information, applications or even certain locations on campus was not an option. In short, traditional methods were not effective. There were too many devices to control, too many applications to prioritize, and too much data pushing and pulling to the web, resulting in latency, lag and slow Internet performance.
After researching multiple technologies, Mr. Harris found an innovative company called CirrusWorks that focuses exclusively on bandwidth optimization. Their flagship product, “The Governor™,” uses software to replace costly configuration and management protocols, dynamically assigning bandwidth to users based on available capacity. The network device does not rely on traditional data intrusion, so it works on encrypted traffic, nor does it impose static rules or policies on user behavior. Rather, The Governor™ uses adaptive intelligence to apply the most fair and equitable distribution of network resources to the population as a whole, ensuring that no single user encumbers the entire group.
“Data throughput rates have been growing exponentially, and we were concerned that poor Internet quality of service was impacting the student experience,” said Mr. Harris. “The results from The Governor™ have been measurable, with service complaints virtually disappearing upon installation. Also important to us, ongoing management and upgrade configuration are not required, freeing up personnel resources and allowing for future upgrades.”
Lynchburg College also appreciated working with a local, Virginia-based company. CirrusWorks is headquartered in Falls Church and operates a manufacturing facility in Danville, Virginia. Its founders and lead investors have built multiple technology companies in Virginia, and they are committed to improving the education experience in the Commonwealth.
Lynchburg College is a private, independent, residential college located on 250 acres in central Virginia. The student body numbers 2,800 undergraduate and graduate students, most of whom live on campus. Lynchburg College offers a strong liberal arts foundation for 39 undergraduate majors, 52 minors, 13 pre-professional programs, and 19 graduate programs, including two doctoral degrees: the doctor of physical therapy and the doctor of education in leadership studies. For more information, please visit www.lynchburg.edu.
CirrusWorks is a leader in bandwidth optimization technologies. Their flagship product, The Governor™, provides a simple, efficient and cost-effective tool for capturing more efficiency and capacity of Internet circuits, getting more out of network infrastructure and improving web-based performance for users on busy BYOD networks. For more information, please visit www.cirrusworks.net.
