Many Australian universities find their teaching and learning spaces increasingly difficult, and expensive, to manage and support. As higher education continues to blend hybrid delivery with enhanced on-campus experiences, IT leaders are confronting a fragmented audio visual (AV) environment that is costly, complex and time consuming to maintain.
Traditional AV setups, often built up gradually through different projects, vendors, and retrofit upgrades, have left universities with complex systems that doesn’t always work well together. This complexity can make it difficult for educators and cause ongoing troubleshooting headaches for IT and AV support teams.
Cisco’s approach to AV, especially when deployed over IP, marks a major change. It merges AV, collaboration, energy and room control tech into one easy-to-manage, future-proof, and lower cost solution.
As universities face mounting financial pressures, decreasing on-campus student attendance, and the need to distinguish the campus experience, AV simplification isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s rapidly becoming a strategic necessity.
In many institutions, AV infrastructure has developed organically over decades. Room by room, layer by layer, new hardware has been added to meet evolving teaching needs, projectors, cameras, microphones, speaker systems, video conferencing endpoints, lighting controllers, HDMI extenders, audio Digital Signal Processers (DSPs), digital signage players, and more.
Each additional component increases complexity and brings more “things” to configure, maintain, patch, and replace. It also elevates the risk of failure. With each vendor-specific integration, there’s a higher chance of software update conflicts, firmware getting out of sync, or devices that simply don’t play nicely together.
While some costs are obvious, such as ongoing maintenance agreements, niche AV skillsets, and downtime, others are less obvious. These include inefficiencies in room utilisation, poor user experience for lecturers and students, and lost time caused by inconsistent interfaces or failed setups.
The technical change behind Cisco’s solution is AV over IP. Rather than relying on legacy AV signal paths, such as HDMI (which is limited by distance and needs extenders), Cisco’s method transmits all audio and video over the IP network using standard Ethernet cabling.
This allows for much simpler deployments as IT teams can utilise a single network cable instead of multiple proprietary cables. This paves the way for improved remote management, centralised troubleshooting, and smarter integration into IT systems.
In practical terms, this means:
The cost benefits are tangible. As one recent deployment example showed, Cisco’s AV over IP approach enabled four rooms to be fitted for the cost of three under the previous model. In some cases, per annum costs per room fell from $100,000 to as low as $25,000, and implementation time shrank from over two weeks to less than a day.
Universities are also increasingly investing in hybrid learning environments, but many existing AV setups just aren’t designed to support high-quality, interactive remote learning.
Cisco’s AV solutions are designed for this new reality. Intelligent cameras that follow speakers, spatial audio, AI-powered automation and framing, and platform-independent conferencing (Webex, Teams, Zoom, etc.) all work together to mimic the in-room experience for remote students.
Beyond video conferencing, Cisco solutions also offer:
The result is a teaching and learning environment that is inclusive, accessible, and engaging, without putting strain on support teams.
Perhaps the greatest benefit of Cisco’s solution is its ability to integrate AV into the IT domain. By operating over the same IP infrastructure and unifying devices under the Cisco Webex platform, universities get a single pane of glass to manage both AV and collaboration systems.
This shift brings several advantages:
In short, AV becomes part of the network, rather than sitting outside it.
Many Australian universities and higher education institutions already depend on Cisco networking as the digital foundation of their campuses. The addition of Cisco AV solutions expands on that investment, allowing clients to streamline and unify AV infrastructure within the same platform, management system, and security framework they already trust.
Data#3 offers more than just product knowledge; we bring extensive technical experience in designing, deploying, and managing networking environments in complex education settings. Our close partnership with Cisco means we understand not just the capabilities of the solution, but how to apply them effectively to deliver real-world impact for IT teams, educators, and students.
Whether you’re retrofitting existing spaces, or designing new teaching environments from scratch, we can help you simplify your AV ecosystem and reduce long-term costs without compromising on experience.
If you’re planning a room refresh or want to find out how to reduce cost and complexity across your campus, contact Data#3 today. We can provide an initial estimate of potential cost savings and help you evaluate Cisco AV as part of your broader network and hybrid learning strategy.
