Established in 1924, Delta State University is a regional, public higher-education institution providing comprehensive undergraduate and graduate-level programs. Unique to Delta State is its Center for Community and Economic Development, which encourages faculty, staff, and students to work with the community on the development of the Mississippi Delta region. In combining its heritage of academic strength with this commitment to serve people and communities, Delta State strives to be the leading regional university in the United States. “For a university such as ours, the right technology is especially important in delivering educational excellence and providing the best student experience,” says Beverly Fratesi, CIO of Delta State University.
In 2006, Delta State began working with BCI, a Cisco® Gold Partner, to improve network connectivity on campus. The university decided to upgrade its existing wired infrastructure to a Cisco Gigabit Ethernet backbone and created various wireless hot spots by deploying Cisco access points in specific areas throughout campus. A year later, the university faced a critical connectivity problem in its family housing. “The dial-up modem bank that we were using to connect these students to the Internet crashed. We had no fiber running to the apartment complex, no CAT5 cabling in the buildings, and no physical space to create a wiring closet. More importantly, we didn’t have the time or budget to create a wired network,” says Fratesi.
