Alliant Intl. University: Wifi Solution For Campuses

Education: Alliant International University


Challenge • Alliant International University has 6 campuses across the State of California • The IT directors needed an affordable solution to provide wireless internet to students and faculty at all campuses • Cisco and Aruba solutions denied by university CFO as too expensive • IT engineers cannot manage all networks on-site • Students constantly complaining about poor or nonexistent signal Meraki Solution • Initial deployment: 77 Meraki Indoors • Cost: $11,473* Results • All 6 campuses have WiFi at less than 20% of the cost of other vendor solutions • IT department has received no complaints • Entire campus network deployed in 2 hours		Nobody could offer us anything as fast for anything close to [Meraki’s] price. George Zlatanov Senior Network Infrastructure Engineer, Alliant International University

The Full Story

George Zlatanov, Senior Network Infrastructure Engineer for Alliant International University knows that no news is good news when it comes to hearing from students about their internet experience. "You know students - they're never happy." That is, until Zlatanov and his IT team deployed Meraki wireless networks at all 6 of the university's California campuses.

"If I don't hear from students, that must be because they have nothing to complain about!" he said.

Before finding Meraki, Zlatanov and Alliant's CIO Pat Miller shopped around for solutions, and demo'd several options, including Aruba Networks and Cisco. "We tried Linksys access points through Cisco, but they were hard to manipulate, they all had static addresses, and they all needed power adapters. You had to provide two cables for each one, and program them individually," Zlatanov said.

Even so, Zlatanov and Miller pitched the solution to the university. "The price tag was $80,000. Our CFO said, 'No way, come up with something cheaper.'" Having had Plan A and Plan B shot down, Miller and Zlatanov say they were looking for Plan I "for Plan Inexpensive."

One of Zlatanov's colleagues had heard of Meraki and pointed them in that direction. It wasn't long before they had several Merakis in hand for a trial. "The access points were very attractively priced," said Zlatanov. "But what really sold us was the Dashboard. The wireless switch interface is hosted by Meraki, and no one else had anything remotely like that."

The initial deployment at the Los Angeles campus took just 2 hours and cost less than $6,000. Additional deployments on other campuses were executed by local campus IT staff, and Zlatanov configured each campus Meraki network remotely. "Painless," he says.