Lincoln University hosted an open day to showcase a major overhaul of its campus network, deploying Huawei’s Agile Education Campus Network Solution to create a new, highly reliable network which delivers high bandwidth, provides total Wi-Fi coverage, and is easy to manage and maintain.
The solution will boost connectivity for all users on campus and make life much easier for network administrators performing operations and maintenance (O&M) or introducing new services.
The network was delivered in collaboration with Huawei channel partner Inde and distributor Atlas Gentech.
Huawei’s unified network solution introduces a centralised management platform for all connected devices, whether accessing the network via Wi-Fi, Ethernet, mobile, or other remote services. To streamline the logon process the network introduces identity-based access in place of the old MAC address system. This allows users to access the network on any device, anywhere they wish using a single login. For example their student or staff ID. For administrators this means a device agnostic platform, viewing each user as a single entity rather than a multitude of connected devices.
Huawei Enterprise Network Product Line and Switch Domain General Manager Wang Shihong said ICT products played a crucial support role in modern education systems.
“For every country in the world, education IT construction has become the inevitable route towards sustainable education development and transformation. Huawei is dedicated to becoming the best ICT partner, helping to improve teaching quality and further bridge the ‘digital divide’.”
The Huawei Agile Education Campus Network Solution utilised at Lincoln University uses the company’s flagship S12700 Agile Switch and incorporates a range of other advance technologies and features:

  • Huawei's advanced Cluster Switch System Generation2 (CSS2) switch fabric hardware technology supports 1+N backup of Main Processing Units (MPUs) in a cluster system, remarkably improving network reliability.
  • Huawei's wired and wireless convergence feature not only implements centralized forwarding of wired and wireless traffic, unified management of wired and wireless services, and unified user authentication, but also allows wired and wireless users to share the bandwidth resource, as well as eliminating the wireless traffic forwarding performance bottleneck.
  • Huawei's Super Virtual Fabric (SVF) vertical virtualization technology virtualizes core, aggregation, and access layer devices, as well as wireless Access Points (APs) into "one device" for centralized management. This technology reduces the number of managed devices as well as O&M workloads and costs, while improving network O&M efficiency.
  • With Huawei's free mobility feature deployed, teachers and students can connect to the campus network at any place in the campus, such as classrooms, lecture halls, dormitories, and outdoor areas, while obtaining network access rights, service priority, and bandwidth corresponding to their identity. This solution ensures a truly consistent experience for users.

Lincoln joins a host of high-profile universities worldwide now using Huawei’s agile networks, such as the UK’s Newcastle University, China’s Tsinghua University and Nanjing University, Ethiopia’s Addis Ababa University, and Australia’s Southern Cross University.