Powering Baylor University’s Technological Leap and Transforming Campus Connectivity

My group is in charge of the infrastructure, which a component of that is the network. And one of the challenges we have with that is that students nowadays the the connectivity that they experience at home is pretty stout, pretty good. And they expect then going to school. At Baylor to have similar type connectivity. For us, delivering network services on a university campus covers a a pretty wide gamut of covering cases in classrooms and research labs to residence halls, And then when they go to these sporting venues, they're we're requiring and we're, you know, just expecting robust networks as well. Certainly have to cover a wide constituents, wide variance of applications in the University campus, try to do a little bit of some high density wireless deployments in some of our classrooms, and we've taken that to another level certainly with our athletic venues. We were blessed yet cursed with the opportunity to build a stadium from scratch. This wasn't a retro fit. We were challenged to have a technology rich environment. And what that means for us is that we have to have the transport. And that's the network. We knew we were gonna use cellular. We knew you're gonna use hardwire Ethernet. We knew we're gonna use WiFi. We went to extreme and said, hey, we need help here because we got a two year timeline to get this thing rolled out. There's a lot that goes into typical Game Day. We're very fortunate that we've got a robust network out there that has met every challenge that we've thrown at it. So far, it's been a very resilient network that's performed well, meeting every application need that we've had from customer experience to radio and press. What I appreciate about the extreme solution is that they have something holistically can cover our campus. Being able to have a partner that has that that breadth of offering is something that we've been able to to leverage quite a bit and has been a strength. What helps me the most is their willingness to to support me. And that could be being able to connect students with with their classroom being able to see how the technology has been able to enable that that type of experience for the students is helpful. The technology is is just a given for me with extreme. I I expect them and have witnessed them being leaders in many many categories. This generation and and that that they're all about their device, and they need to be connected. And we have to find the technologies in which to satisfy that need. And, frankly, that draws me to my partners. I can buy technology from anybody, and there's plenty of it out there. But what differentiates is is who I wanna be a partner with. And to me, a good partner is a servant. It's someone that is willing to listen to our needs, not so much worried about the bottom line. I mean, everyone's here to to make money, I understand. But more interested in and what our needs are to meet our goals, and and that's what I see in extreme.