CABLE-LESS CAMPUSES
Students
at area campuses access the latest technology without being connected
to cable.
By Liese Hutchison
Most colleges
and universities are steep in history and rich with tradition.
Ivory-covered brick buildings, some almost 200 years old, are
required to house the latest technology. When it comes time to
install miles of cables, access jacks and computer hardware, universities
find out that updating technology services for today's students
is an expensive and labor-intensive proposition.
Two
leading technology providers, Lucent Technologies and Cisco Systems,
offer products that allow schools, as well as other types of businesses,
the ability to provide intranet and Internet access to users without
the cable. Wireless technology, vastly improved from just a few
years ago, has three advantages over cabling, notes John Sargent,
president of PRO Networks, a leading reseller for Lucent and Cisco.
"First
of all, wireless is less expensive. When wiring any facility,
including campuses, you have the cost of installation and materials
to contend with, as well as the possibility of tearing up roads
and walls to lay all the cable," he states. "Secondly, a wireless
system allows freedom to the organization to set up work spaces,
classrooms and labs anywhere and redesign those spaces without
worrying about where the computer outlets are. Finally, the users
have the mobility to work where they want within a few hundred
feet of the access point. So students can take their laptops and
work outside, in their dorms, at the student union or in the class
rooms."
The
way wireless works is simple. Small boxes, typically 10-inch square,
are positioned around a building. Authorized users will have laptops
inserted with an ethernet card. This card accesses the signal
of the access point, allowing the user to retrieve information
from the university intranet system, such as library files, e-mails
or faculty web sites.
"It's
much cheaper to put two to three access points on each dorm floor
than cable each individual room," Sargent remarks. Access points
are positioned around campus to ensure coverage everywhere, including
outside.
Paul
Younker, network administrator for Greenville College in Greenville,
Ill., first looked into the cost of wiring every dorm room and
found the bids he collected were too high for his budget. "We
had taken a look at wireless a couple of years ago and it just
wasn't ready then. We took a look at it again and saw that the
bandwidth had improved tremendously," he says. "It cost us to
cover the entire campus wirelessly for what it would have cost
us to wire just five dorms.
"In
addition, we had talked about wiring all the classrooms and that
would have cost us, with cabling expenses, $25,000 per classroom.
Now that the campus is wireless, we don't need to wire each classroom."
Greenville College, which covers approximately 20 city blocks
and encompasses 15 buildings, has 58 access points spread throughout
the campus.
Younkers
points out that this fall, incoming freshmen will be required
to have a laptop computer. They then will receive an ethernet
card that will allow them access to campus information and the
Internet.
Washington
University is experimenting with wireless technology for its computer
science students, says Allen Rueter, director of computer technology
services. "With the three access points we've purchased for our
space, our students can now come into an area and have access
to faculty, teaching assistants, graders and each other in order
to complete their projects," he states. "It allows them to work
wherever they happen to plop down."
Rueter points
out that during a typical morning, the hardwired computer lab
is empty, but at night, it's packed. If everyone went wireless,
he says, the department wouldn't have the expense of maintaining
equipment that's not used to maximum efficiency and students can
access the system regardless of the time. "Wireless provides more
computing on demand as well as allowing us to allocate computing
resources more wisely."
A project
that Rueter oversees involves analyzing the effects of a wireless
community. "We have thesis projects underway by our graduate students
who are examining mobile technology. They're probing such things
as what constitutes a mobile environment and who becomes the router
for everyone else to get out the information," Rueter states.
Sargent
points out that universities and other organizations don't need
to be concerned about a wireless environment from a security standpoint.
"Users still have to log into the system just as if they were
hardwired in at their desks," he says.
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