Schools Ready Their Wireless Facilities for the Future
A Q&A with Cisco’s Gary DePreta
For colleges and universities today, upgrading the school wireless facilities is no longer a matter of making a few select technical upgrades. To provide on the pledge of emerging technologies and satisfy the operational expectations of a modern-day university constituency, forward-looking IT leaders are making plans to improve their networks– from the ground up, and for the future.
< img height="429"alt="Illustration of school structure with cordless symbol"width= "644"src ="https://campustechnology.com/-/media/EDU/CampusTechnology/2026/04/20260413ModernizingwirelessOrig.jpg"/ > Organizations now prepare for multi-year, full modernizations of the campus cordless facilities. These plans not just bring the speed and abilities of the latest in Wi-Fi; they give campus a future-ready state that can respond rapidly to a wave of AI-driven applications, or the proliferation of brand-new BYOD devices that fill bandwidth, or the explosive development of data repositories produced by novel research programs.
Whatever is coming, universities aim to be prepared to turn brand-new technologies and practices into chances for development and eventually, ROI on the organization’s investment in cordless facilities.
Here, we talk with Gary DePreta, Cisco’s senior vice president of U.S. public sector, about cordless infrastructure modernization and a study just released by Cisco (April, 2026) that assists strategists comprehend the impacts of radical changes in the cordless community.
Mary Grush: Thank you for talking with us today about modernizing cordless facilities for higher education.
Gary DePreta: It’s good to be here … happy to do it. As you and your readers might know, Mary, we have actually just released our inaugural report on The State of Wireless. My chat here with you is the very first conversation I’m having externally about this fantastic research report from Cisco.
Grush: Let’s start with a concern that’s central to campus strategies in today’s extremely linked knowing environments.
School environments are seeing increased demand from hybrid learning, linked gadgets, and ingenious applications for instruction, administration, and research study. How are these trends improving cordless facilities requirements in college?
DePreta: All of us see a great deal of characteristics around cordless infrastructure for education, but the crucial thing schools are realizing now is to respond to this not as another innovation upgrade, but as a true network modernization for the whole campus. That’s the mindset that’s going to deliver ROI, ultimately.
Grush: So institution of higher learnings have updated their networks throughout the years, but it sounds like today it’s different. New chances and escalating demands indicate thorough modification.
DePreta: Yes. But bear in mind that even with the full-scale modernizations that would solve a few of these problems and support many innovations technically, it is essential to understand that at the end of the day, we wish to provide a super-positive experience for students, professors, administrators, and researchers. It’s not about the technology or tools; it has to do with providing the very best experience possible.