The storied academic institution, based in Pittsburgh, has been offering classes in Silicon Valley since 2002. The Mountain View, Calif., campus specializes in graduate programs in software engineering, software and management, security, mobile technology, and engineering and technology innovation and management.

"Our Silicon Valley campus offers programs focused on mobility issues in business, and this new wireless platform will give our students, faculty, and staff the seamless connectivity they need to adapt to next-generation networks," said Pradeep K. Khosla, dean of Carnegie Mellon's College of Engineering. "Motorola's enterprise WLAN solution provides us with reliable coverage, enterprise-class security and unprecedented RF manageability."

Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley installed the Motorola RFS7000, the industry's only WLAN switch designed to integrate Wi-Fi, mesh, RFID and other emerging RF technologies, in combination with 802.11a/b/g AP300 access ports (APs), to provide wireless Internet access to students and faculty across the entire campus. Built on Motorola's Wi-NG architecture, the RFS7000 enables campus-wide roaming across subnets, improves failover capabilities, enhances quality of service, increases voice capability and provides superior security. The wireless switch also provides Carnegie Mellon University West with a unified RF platform, enabling the wireless network to grow over time by adding additional RF technologies.

Carnegie Mellon will also integrate the Motorola WLAN technology into its Silicon Valley classrooms, utilizing it as a mobility platform for emerging wireless technologies and next-generation networks. The RFS7000 can support seamless mobile access to multiple RF networks, providing interfaces for WLAN, mesh, cellular, RFID and in the future WiMAX to enable a wide range of networking, locationing and fixed/mobile convergence solutions.

With the RFS7000, Carnegie Mellon can leverage Motorola's comprehensive, integrated RF Management Suite -- a set of tools that helps enterprises more easily and centrally plan, deploy, manage and secure their RF infrastructure and environment. RF Management Suite delivers savings to the university by enabling 24/7 remote management and diagnostics of the wireless network at any location to greatly simplify the task of centrally managing a distributed, campus-wide WLAN.

Motorola provides robust, enterprise-class security to Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley, including an integrated firewall between a company's wireless traffic and the rest of the network, and supports the latest encryption and authentication standards available from IEEE, including Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) and WPA2.

"Motorola has extensive expertise in building seamless indoor and outdoor wireless networks -- from a 12th century castle in Ireland that is a tourist and business conference destination to large distribution centers and new construction sites," said Sujai Hajela, vice president and general manager of Enterprise WLAN, Motorola Enterprise Mobility business. "The Motorola WLAN at Carnegie Mellon University West not only provides enhanced mobility access to its students and faculty, it offers a platform for enabling new mobility services that can be managed by the state-of-the-art RFS7000 WLAN switch."  

Keywords: carnegie mellon university campus, next generation networks, rf technologies, wlan solution, wlan technology, wireless internet access, voice capability, seamless connectivity, failover capabilities, ap300, motorola inc, wireless platform, mesh networks