Cisco and UW-Madison announce wireless deployment

San Jose, Calif. - Cisco Systems has reached an agreement with UW-Madison for the deployment of a large-scale wireless local area network.

The UW-Madison campus serves 41,500 students, 3,800 faculty and approximately 7,500 staff. The campus includes more than 180 buildings spread across 933 acres. UW-Madison's network services include a university portal where students can access a personalized window of their financial records, course schedules, e-mail and calendar.

With plans to deploy 2,200 Cisco Aironet Access Points (APs) within the next nine months, the University has begun deployment of the Cisco Aironet 1200 Series APs in libraries, student unions and other buildings across campus, and has installed approximately 400 so far. The university's Division of Information Technology estimates that about 30 percent of faculty and staff and 40% of the students currently use the wireless network.

UW-Madison CIO Annie Stunden said that while the campus had been adopting wireless technology, it had been in a more piecemeal fashion. The deployment will replace the smaller, departmental wireless networks with a centrally supported, highly secure, wireless network, Stunden said.