400+ Students. 12 Floors. One of the Biggest Networks We’ve Ever Built.
When a multi-million-dollar building goes up, everyone focuses on the physical structure: the steel, the glass, the floors.
But a 12-story educational facility with 400-plus students doesn’t run on steel and glass. It runs on the network underneath everything, and that network had to be designed before the first device got plugged in.
This client came to us with a serious set of requirements. They had multiple types of spaces: classrooms, performance centers, and other media facilities—and each came with its own demands. But the underlying requirements came down to two main ideas:
Simultaneous Connection
Hundreds of students would be connecting dozens of devices simultaneously.
Streaming &
Recording
Performance centers need robust systems to enable high-quality streaming and recording.
And all of it had to work reliably, every day, for everyone in the building.
This was one of the largest network projects we’ve taken on. We were glad to do it.
What We Did
We designed the network from scratch. We made sure to account for the building’s scale, its diverse spaces, and the performance requirements of an institution that serves hundreds of students across multiple environments every single day.
We used Cisco Meraki as the backbone. Meraki is cloud-managed, which means centralized control and visibility across all access points and floors. When you’re managing a 12-story building, you need to know what’s happening everywhere—not just in the room where something breaks.
We handled the full procurement and implementation. Every component was selected, configured, and validated against the building’s actual operational demands before it went live.
What Changed
The result is a network built for the way this facility actually operates.
Their new building has a high-density wireless network that holds up when hundreds of devices are online at once. Performance spaces are built with the streaming and recording capabilities the institution needs to do its work. Finally, they have a unified infrastructure that supports every space in the building without requiring separate systems for separate needs.
This project ranks among the largest and most technically complex things we’ve built. And honestly, that’s the kind of work we love, the ones that require us to bring everything we’ve got.
Planning a New Facility or a Major Network Overhaul?
PC Professional has designed enterprise-grade network infrastructure across the Bay Area for education, business, and beyond.