University of Reading Reimagines its Campus Network to Support Student Success
University of Reading enhances the student experience with Mist AI
University of Reading, one of the most popular education choices in the UK, needed a quick and seamless way to meet their digital transformation goals. In this episode, Reading’s Chief Digital & Information Officer explains how Juniper Mist AI helped the university achieve their five-year goal of enhancing the student experience in just one year.
You’ll learn
How Juniper Mist AI helps support and engage Reading’s students no matter where they are on campus
How Mist simplifies Reading’s business operations
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Transcript
0:03 When it came to the crunch of
0:04 We need to replace our Wi-Fi
0:06 because it was end of life,
0:08 we took the opportunity to see what Juniper were doing in the market
0:11 and were really quite excited about this opportunity
0:15 of not just replacing a standard Wi-Fi solution,
0:18 actually doing something different.
0:26 When I first arrived here, actually first day,
0:29 I had two critical incidents and I thought,
0:31 Crikey, what have I joined here?
0:33 But after a period of time of trying to understand the spaghetti,
0:37 as we called it, of our various bits of infrastructure,
0:40 we have unpicked all of that.
0:43 We've moved a lot to cloud services as a principle,
0:45 that was one of the first things we moved to.
0:47 The proof of concept told us that the Wi-Fi works,
0:51 and it not only works, but it can make itself better,
0:54 and libraries are really good tests because they've got lots of metal,
0:58 lots of high ceilings and lots of books,
1:01 which makes Wi-Fi really difficult.
1:02 So it's a really good test to see how it would work
1:05 and compare it to other vendors.
1:07 It survived that test really well and it got the head of library
1:10 really excited about the capabilities of that kind of nudge technology
1:14 using the location services,
1:16 so that students could wayfind,
1:18 navigate themselves around what is quite a complex building,
1:21 and get to where they need to quickly.
1:25 Simplifying operations is one of the business case drivers,
1:28 why we signed off Mist in the first place.
1:31 Sustainability is probably the most important
1:34 strategic objective of the university,
1:36 so things like knowing your buildings, knowing how occupied they are,
1:40 can we turn the lights off, can we turn the heating off,
1:43 plugging into our building management system
1:45 and making sure that we're optimising the campus.
1:48 That's the only way we're going to achieve those targets
1:50 that have been set by our executive team.
1:53 And so it was a very easy answer in the end
1:55 to choose Juniper Mist.
1:57 It ticked our boxes really clearly,
2:00 it's ticked our boxes ever since, two or three years later,
2:03 and we're still ticking along those boxes into the future
2:06 as we continue to roll out
2:08 more innovative solutions through Juniper Mist.