Field notes, powered by ewusOS
Campus Wi-Fi: one network, many roles, one view
Campus networks usually get built one building at a time, which means the person responsible ends up with several networks and no single view of any of them.
Coverage is the easy half
Adding access points is a solved problem. Knowing which of them is currently the reason somebody cannot submit an assignment is not.
The gap is usually visibility: each building reports on itself, in its own way, and nothing joins those reports together. The result is a network that can be described building by building but never answered for as a whole.
What one view has to include
- Health per site, so a failing link is visible before it becomes a queue of complaints.
- Congestion, distinguished from an actual outage.
- Devices that belong to nobody, across every building rather than one at a time.
- Policy events, so a rule that is firing constantly can be found and fixed.
Roles travel, buildings do not
A student in a hostel, a library and a lecture hall is the same person with the same entitlements. A network that treats each building separately makes them three users and gets all three slightly wrong. Identity that follows the person is what makes one policy work everywhere.
EWUS runs the same operating system on every gateway, with a site dashboard per location and the same identity model across all of them, so a campus is administered as one network rather than as a collection that happens to share a name.
Where EWUS actually is. The gateway described here is pre-certification: there is no stock, no pre-orders and no availability date, and nothing on this site is a photograph of finished hardware. What is described is what ewusOS is built to do. If it fits a problem you have, the waiting list is the only thing on offer today.