Education Institute — Campus Network
A campus-wide secure Wi-Fi and segmented wired network deployment for a 2000-student engineering college in Gwalior — eliminating dead zones, isolating staff/student/guest traffic and delivering rock-solid connectivity even during peak online exam windows.
The Challenge
The college had grown from 600 to over 2000 students in five years, but its network had not. A handful of consumer-grade Wi-Fi routers were daisy-chained across three buildings, leaving large dead zones in labs, the library and the hostels. Students routinely sat on the floor near routers during project submissions just to grab a working signal, and the campus-wide password had been shared so many times that even local tea-stall owners within Wi-Fi range knew it.
Faculty and administrative systems ran on the same flat network as student and guest devices — there was no segmentation between staff records, exam servers and the open Wi-Fi. During end-semester online exams the access points would repeatedly max out, sometimes disconnecting mid-paper, and the IT team had no monitoring to even tell them which access point had failed until a complaint came in. Helpdesk tickets routinely went unanswered for days.
Leadership was under pressure on three fronts: a pending NAAC accreditation visit that demanded demonstrable IT infrastructure, a recent ransomware incident at a neighbouring Gwalior college that exposed the lack of network isolation, and a growing expectation from students that campus connectivity match what they got at home. They needed a network that was fast, segmented, monitored and defensible — delivered inside one summer break.
"During last year's online exams, three access points died in the middle of a paper. We had no idea until students started calling. We knew we couldn't face another exam season with this network — but we had only the summer window to fix it." — Prof. S____, IT Head
Our Solution
Curio began with a full RF (radio frequency) site survey of all three buildings using professional Wi-Fi analysis tools, mapping signal strength, channel contention and interference at every corridor, lab and classroom. The survey revealed that the college needed roughly 38 access points — not the 12 it had — to deliver consistent 5 GHz coverage at the densities students actually create during project submissions.
We redesigned the campus network around three isolated VLANs: a Staff VLAN for faculty and administrative systems (with access to the exam server and student records), a Student VLAN for campus Wi-Fi users (RADIUS-authenticated against the college's existing identity system, internet-only), and a Guest VLAN for visitors and parents (captive-portal, time-limited, fully isolated). Inter-VLAN routing is denied by default at the Fortinet next-generation firewall, with explicit allow-rules only for the college's learning-management system.
All access points were ceiling-mounted and powered through PoE+ switches over new Cat6 structured cabling, with redundant uplinks between buildings. We hardened the Wi-Fi with WPA3-Enterprise (802.1X) for staff and students, deployed a Fortinet next-generation firewall with application-aware policies and DNS filtering, and stood up a Zabbix monitoring server with email + SMS alerting so the IT team sees a failed AP within seconds, not hours. The whole deployment was sequenced to land inside the eight-week summer break.
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Site SurveyFull RF survey of three buildings, heat-map of coverage gaps, capacity planning for 2000+ concurrent users.
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Network DesignVLAN segmentation plan (staff/student/guest), RADIUS auth design, firewall policy matrix and IP schema.
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Cabling & APsCat6 structured cabling, PoE+ switches, ceiling-mounted UniFi access points, inter-building redundant uplinks.
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Security PoliciesFortinet next-gen firewall, WPA3-Enterprise (RADIUS), DNS filtering, inter-VLAN routing lockdown.
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Monitoring & HandoverZabbix monitoring with SMS alerts, IT-team training, as-built documentation, post-launch support window.
Results & Impact
The new network went live two weeks before the start of the autumn semester, giving the IT team time to stress-test it during the orientation week rush. Wi-Fi uptime, which previously hovered around 82% with daily dropouts, has held at 99.5% across the first full semester — including the end-semester online exam window that had been the original pain point, with zero mid-paper disconnects across 1400+ students.
Helpdesk tickets related to connectivity dropped 60% in the first three months, freeing the small IT team to focus on actual academic-system support rather than chasing dead routers. The three-way VLAN segmentation gave the college a clean answer for its NAAC visit and isolated the exam server from the open student network — closing the same class of risk that had hit the neighbouring college. Zabbix now flags failing APs to the IT team's phones within seconds of an outage, before a single student notices.
"For the first time, our exam week went without a single network complaint. The monitoring dashboard tells us about a failing access point before any student even notices. The NAAC panel was genuinely impressed with the network documentation Curio handed over." — Prof. S____, IT Head
Services Used
Network Deployment
Site survey, structured Cat6 cabling, 38 UniFi access points and redundant inter-building uplinks across the campus.
Explore serviceInformation Security
WPA3-Enterprise, Fortinet next-gen firewall, VLAN isolation and DNS filtering to protect exam and student records.
Explore serviceIT Infrastructure
PoE+ switching, Zabbix monitoring with SMS alerting and as-built documentation for the NAAC accreditation audit.
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