University of Dayton, Miami University Among the First to Use Procera SmartCampus 2.0 Solutions

With the sheer amount of college students on campus at most universities, it would be nearly impossible to personally monitor the school's network activity and student behavior on the Web. During peak hours, there could be an overwhelming demand for bandwidth between everyone streaming HD video, downloading files, researching school work and obsessively checking social networks.

Administrators need an intelligent solution to help them out, and many have been using various intelligent policy enforcement (IPE) software, which vastly simplify the job. But needless to say, it’s far from perfect.

An update to Procera's popular SmartCampus IPE service has just been released, complete with fundamental improvements and added features to modernize the whole policy enforcement process. The SmartCampus 2.0 suite is powered by PacketLogic Subscriber Manager (PSM), which allows the system to deliver in-depth analytics and actionable policy services. The platform seamlessly integrates to virtually any third-party system through user-friendly APIs, providing some of the most extensive support for IPE needs.

Miami University and the University of Dayton are among the first colleges to embrace the 2.0 upgrade, and are generally satisfied with the service. Director of network engineering at Miami University, Chris Bernard, explained the school's interest and satisfaction with SmartCampus: "Based on our experience rolling out SmartCampus, we are confident that Procera can integrate policy enforcement with any of our other systems. The flexibility and depth that Procera has in this area is second to none."

Judging by Bernard's statement, it appears that SmartCampus truly is easily integrated with a broad range of systems, which is really one of its selling points. The main goal here is to reduce costs by using an IPE service to limit bandwidth and administer the network activity of students – not to dump even more funding into upgrading the entire system already in place.

That said, once the actual IPE suite is in place, the next concern would probably be how well it actually works. Students aren't only browsing the Web \ their laptops, but with a ton of other gadgets – smartphones, tablets, gaming consoles and other various Wi-Fi-enabled devices.

Director of systems and networking at the University of Dayton, Al Stern, announced his experience with using SmartCampus to work with these various devices, stating, "Procera's SmartCampus enables us to identify and enforce usage allowances for users consuming high-bandwidth applications across multiple devices, such as laptops pulling down HD movies and streaming gaming consoles.”

He went on to explain how Procera's suite can limit a student’s bandwidth allotment once it's exceeded – dynamically reducing their consumption rate and “preserving the Quality of Experience” for other users.

SmartCampus can also log all users along with their network activity, to comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). This means that copyright violators will be taken down and dealt with in a uniform manner, improving the school's image and ensuring that copyrighted material isn't infringed upon.