Organizations Beef Up Wi-Fi to Support BYOD

The city of Lakeland, Fla., had an aging wireless network based on fat access points that had no management economies of scale. "We wanted a wireless solution that we could manage better and prepare for bring-your-own-device initiatives," says Roy Osborne, Lakeland's network administrator.

Last January, the city's IT department began deploying Juniper Networks gear (more than half of the network infrastructure is based on Juniper switches). Osborne rolled out two Juniper wireless controllers along with 68 Juniper access points — WLA532 APs for use indoors and WLA632s for outdoors.

All Around the Town

"We're kind of unique because we run our own electric com­pany, so we have fiber everywhere," Osborne says. "In downtown, we have free public Wi-Fi with outdoor APs for public access, and we also provide the APs for Florida Southern College."

The upgrade has been working well so far for Lakeland, which averages 1,700 wireless connections per day. "We're surprised at how small the wireless APS are; they look like smoke detectors. We're getting better coverage and can use fewer APs on a floor," Osborne says.

BYOD Onboarding

Osborne's IT group manages roughly 800 wireless endpoints, which are a mix of city-provided and employee-owned devices. "We took the first step toward BYOD when some directors were getting iPads," he says.

However, the city's existing wireless LAN limited the usefulness of BYOD because although the stand-alone network provided Internet access, there was no way to connect to the enterprise network. Now, the new WLAN affords employees access to government resources.

The city also implemented Juniper Networks SmartPass wireless security management and SmartPass Connect provisioning tool to provision new BYOD users. "SmartPass provides splash screens for acceptable-use policies, and can create different profiles for different users and switch them between virtual LANs," Osborne says.

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