Marietta College Solves Student WiFi Problems Caused by Insatiable Demand for Bandwidth

Marietta, Ohio, April 19, 2016 (Newswire.com) - Tired of throwing money at more bandwidth every year with no measurable improvement, the network operations team at Marietta College set out to find a bandwidth management tool that could specifically address the problem of network saturation during peak usage periods. Like many campuses, students are overwhelming the public-facing WiFi network with myriad devices, applications and “heavy” data demands. At any given moment, hundreds of concurrent users compete for limited bandwidth capacity, congesting the network and diminishing the Quality of Experience (QoE) for the vast majority of students online.

The challenge was sorting through all of the technologies, and price points, available to network administrators. Most multi-function platforms address many monitoring, management and security issues, but few were purpose-built to solve the bandwidth congestion problems facing busy college WiFi networks. What is more, virtually none of them fully operate on end-to-end encrypted traffic!

We feel like we're able to come up for air. Many products aim to do a lot more functions, but we needed immediate relief of our Internet congestion problems caused by overwhelming student demand for bandwidth during peak usage periods.

Mike Robinson, Network Administrator

Until they discovered CirrusWorks. Built by network operators to specifically address the data congestion issues caused by streaming, gaming and otherwise uncontrollable encrypted traffic, CirrusWorks has developed a unique bandwidth optimization platform that dynamically assesses and allocates bandwidth among multiple competing users on a network in real time, without static rule sets, complicated prioritization schemes or intrusive Deep Packet Inspection (DPI).

“We feel like we’re able to come up for air,” says Mike Robinson, Network Administrator of Marietta College. “Many products aim to do a lot more functions, but we needed immediate relief of our Internet congestion problems caused by overwhelming student demand for bandwidth during peak usage periods.”

When Marietta College looked at traditional packet shapers, the list was long on functions but short on actual “network performance.” Many were originally built as content filters, monitoring platforms or private network optimization engines. Most require some form of DPI, which isn’t even possible on encrypted traffic, or they use heuristic algorithms to “guess” what applications are running and then follow fixed prioritization rules to sort the data streams. It is processor-intensive, and it can’t keep up with the enormous volumes of data required by students on campus WiFi networks.

“CirrusWorks is taking snapshots of the data flows in microseconds, and then dynamically assigning bandwidth to users in proportion to their requirements relative to the entire group. It’s a type of crowd control for busy WiFi networks.”

Marietta College is a co-educational private college in historic Marietta, Ohio. The school offers 45 majors along with a large number of minors, all of which are grounded in a strong liberal arts foundation. The school enrolls 1,250 full-time students. It is known for its Petroleum Engineering, Athletic Training, McDonough Leadership, and Physician Assistant programs, as well as its China Program.

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.

Source: CirrusWorks, Inc.