Customer Success Story
AI-driven Wi-Fi supports learning and assessment in Virginia’s Smyth County
Families living in Smyth County, nestled in Southwest Virginia, have easy access to the mountains and the benefits of small-town living. Their children also have access to quality education and the latest educational technologies to help them reach their full potential.
Smyth County Public Schools relies on an AI-driven wireless network from Juniper to support learning and the state’s high-stakes educational assessments used to measure achievement.
Overview
| Company | Smyth County Public Schools (Virginia) |
| Industry | Education |
| Products used | AP43, AP32, Wireless (Wi-Fi) Assurance |
| Region | Americas |
4100
Students at 14 schools have access to digital learning resources
10,000
Devices connected to Wi-Fi 6
114
Chromebooks were identified in minutes as requiring software updates prior to the state’s educational assessment
920
Secure personal networks were created for teachers’ classrooms in 15 minutes
Let AI-driven network operations take the lead
Terry Hawthorne, director of technology at Smyth County Public Schools, knew that cloud-managed networks were the future.
When the district’s legacy Wi-Fi solution became increasingly problematic, Hawthorne took action. All students have Chromebooks or tablets, but for many, the Wi-Fi regularly dropped, disrupting learning. One school in particular faced nagging issues with radio-frequency (RF) interference from the Wi-Fi in neighboring homes.
IT was spending significant time addressing wireless connectivity problems, leaving less time for strategic work.
The district evaluated its options for next-generation cloud-managed networking, and the Juniper Wireless Access solution, driven by Mist AI, took top honors.
“The ease of troubleshooting with Juniper and Mist AI tipped the scales,” says Hawthorne. “With Juniper, we get a heads up when a client is losing connectivity, and it’s much easier to troubleshoot RF interference.”
Mist AI empowers IT to do more
With Juniper, Smyth County’s 14 schools have Wi-Fi that’s predictable, reliable, and measurable. The network provides connectivity for 10,000 wireless devices used by the county’s 4100 students, as well as teachers and administrators.
Juniper cloud services, including Juniper Mist Wi-Fi Assurance and Juniper Marvis Virtual Network Assistant, provide IT with clear visibility into the quality of user experiences. The AI capabilities quickly identify any issues and accelerate resolution, alleviating the IT team’s workload.
Frustrations over slow Wi-Fi and unexpected dropouts have all but disappeared. IT no longer spends time chasing RF ghosts. Instead, Juniper’s AI-driven radio resource management continuously learns and optimizes the RF environment, taking into account nearby wireless LANs and other external sources of interference.
“With the older Wi-Fi, we had to fiddle with the power settings on the APs,” says Hawthorne. “With Juniper, we set up the device profiles and haven’t touched them since.”
Teachers can more easily use smart TVs, 3D printers, and other devices in their classrooms. The district uses Juniper’s private pre-shared key functionality, which operates similarly to passwords, to set up secure personal LANs for teachers.
“We didn’t have the ability to do that before,” says Hawthorne. He created a Python script that generated 920 private encryption keys in 15 minutes, which he then imported into the Mist dashboard. “It was so easy to create personal LANs,” he says.
Empowering learners and supporting state assessments
When students and teachers returned to the classroom in 2021, many of the digital learning habits from early in the pandemic carried over, such as greater reliance on the learning management system and video. A Juniper network allows the IT team at Smyth County schools to meet those higher bandwidth requirements more efficiently.
“We can support more devices with the same number of IT people because the Juniper wireless is so stable and easy to troubleshoot,” says Hawthorne.
Even the intensive technology preparation for Virginia’s annual standards of learning (SOL) assessment is easier. Devices used for the online tests must meet certain requirements. If the device requirements aren’t met, the student cannot access the test.
“Our IT technician wrote a simple query for the Mist dashboard,” says Hawthorne. “We saw that 114 Chromebooks needed to be updated so there wouldn’t be problems during testing. A simple reboot to update to the latest ChromeOS was all that was necessary.”
The Products
AP43
The Juniper AP43 high-performance Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) access point integrates patented virtual Bluetooth® LE (vBLE) and Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities to deliver an unprecedented user experiences.
AP32
The Juniper AP32 access point integrates Mist AI for AX capabilities to automate network operation and boost Wi-Fi performance.
Wireless (Wi-Fi) Assurance
Driven by Mist AI and machine learning, the Juniper Mist Wireless Assurance cloud service automates troubleshooting and operations, making wireless networks predictable, reliable, and measurable while providing near-real-time visibility into user service levels.
Published June 2022