Cisco Cisco 5508 Wireless Controller Prospecto

Challenge

Named after a chemical element discovered in the German city of Darmstadt, the 

darmstadtium is a high-tech convention center with strong links to the city’s business 

and academic communities. It has a bold, asymmetric design and offers 18,000m

2

 of 

meeting space primarily used by banks, ICT companies, and academic delegates from 

the city’s technical university.
The darmstadtium competes with a large number of rival congress centers. This 

fiercely fought-over market is changing as demand increases for bring-your-own-

device (BYOD) connectivity. Visitors routinely arrive with up to three devices. Patrick 

Gaußmann, the mobile networking project leader at darmstadtium, says: “The surge in 

BYOD over the last seven years has brought a huge change.”
To stand out from the competition, darmstadtium wanted to take the wireless 

experience to the next level with unrivalled connection speed and reliability. 

Technologies from four vendors, including Cisco, were evaluated. Key priorities 

included functionality, robustness, bandwidth, and outstanding in-house coverage 

across all public areas.

Solution

Already equipped with a Cisco wireless local area network (WLAN), firewalls, email 

and web security, the center chose Cisco® Unified Access for cohesive integration 

and ease of management. In particular, darmstadtium liked the way that Unified 

Access provided a simple foundation to support BYOD with unified management and 

optimized wireless performance. Another reason for choosing Cisco was speed to 

market with the new 802.11ac Wi-Fi standard, enabling 5GHz high data throughput.
“We always endeavor to keep up with new developments and the changing demands 

of our customers,” says Gaußmann. “We wanted to transform our network to one 

enabled for BYOD and its challenges, in terms of managing huge demand spikes and 

different types of user devices. So we met the task by upgrading to Cisco.”

Customer Case Study

darmstadtium gets competitive advantage with Cisco Wi-Fi experience and unified network 

management and security

Customer Name: 

darmstadtium

Industry: 

Service Provider

Location: 

Germany

Number of Employees: 

38

Challenge

• Meet bring-your-own-device challenges
• Create powerful venue differentiator in 

crowded marketplace

Solution

• Cisco Unified Access Network, with 

Cisco Prime Infrastructure for managing 
connected experience and 802.11ac 
wireless

Results

• Average user satisfaction achieves top 

rating

• Unique selling point created with 

market-leading wireless platform 

• Ability to offer better customer 

experience at significantly lower price 

© 2014 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. 

 

Page 1 of 2