University of West London Unleashes The ‘Connected Student’ With Alcatel-Lucent

The University of West London has selected Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise (ALE) to virtualise its core infrastructure and allow students and teachers to stay connected.

As part of a digital transformation strategy, the new network will enable the introduction of new learning tools and applications and is expected to both increase bandwidth and improve network performance by up to 900 percent.

The new virtual chassis solution will also simplify network management, provide flexible expansion capabilities and reduce operating costs.

Connected campus

Technology is playing an ever-increasing role in education, leading many schools, colleges and universities to carry out digital transformations as they begin to realise the potential benefits on offer.

For a university with a large campus, delivering reliable and secure Wi-Fi has never been more important. ALE’s platform will help University of West London staff and students to stay connected while accessing teaching resources and application services on demand.

It will significantly reduce the network footprint and decrease operational expenses as power consumption and data centre costs are reduced.

Furthermore, ALE’s Intelligent Fabric technology will help to reduce the burden on IT operations through essentially simplifying and automating the various management operations on the network, which removes the need to have a human expert overseeing each network protocol. 

Stephen Negi, deputy director of IT services at the University of West London said: “Moving away from a traditional core to a virtualised chassis puts us in a great position to deliver the quality service and experience which students today are demanding from their universities.

“The flexibility of this type of network infrastructure will allow us to incorporate the emerging web-based applications and digital resources that are making their way into teaching environments. The ability to easily scale IT resources where necessary, while still managing IT expenditure and operational complexity is an absolute must for the UK educational sector.”

Quiz: The wonderful world of Wi-Fi