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Wireless LANs in Higher Education
Universities and colleges are among the most aggressive adopters of Wi-Fi technology. The trend toward more collaborative and open learning environments, fueled by the explosive adoption of mobile devices among students and faculty, makes higher education campuses fertile ground for wireless LANs.
Benefits of Wireless in Higher Education
Wireless delivers value for network users and the institution in general as well as network administrators. For students and faculty-a particularly mobile se t of technology enthusiasts-wireless networking delivers productivity and convenience. For the IT staff, wireless represents a comprehensive broadband network solution that can be deployed without the hefty price tag or administrative overhead of traditional wired LANs.
Students & Faculty
- Flexibility: With anytime, anywhere access to resources, students can conduct schoolwork in unconventional settings-the campus quad, cafeteria, student center, library and many other places around the campus. Similarly, wireless enables instructors to deliver lessons outside of the classroom, such as lab exercises in outdoor settings.
- E-learning: Instructors can complement classroom instruction with on-line activities to create an integrated learning experience.
- Communication: By providing easy access to communications tools such as e-mail and online group discussion boards, wireless facilitates team building across multiple disciplines.
Institution
- Revenue: Wi-Fi presents potential revenue-generating opportunities. For example, universities could charge visitors for wireless Internet access. Also, colleges that may have once charged for long distance phone services, but have seen such opportunities evaporate in recent years, might consider introducing wireless VoIP services to students.
- Competitiveness: Today?s students are more technologically savvy than ever. Wireless access throughout campus and student living areas helps academic institutions compete for students and faculty.
- Innovation: By fostering a more collaborative and creative learning environment, Wi-Fi enables the university to better support its academic mission and research objectives.
WLANs in Higher Education
IT Organization
- Scalability: With the increasing awareness of consumer Wi-Fi products, students and faculty expect ubiquitous Internet access on campus. Wi-Fi enables the IT staff to quickly meet these demands across a large geographic area.
- Flexibility: Wireless can provide network access to locations where wiring is impossible (e.g., older buildings with historic value or asbestos concerns) or where access is only needed for temporary use, such as events facilities.
- Lower cost: Cabling for Ethernet can be a costly and time-consuming exercise. In comparison, wireless can be installed much more quickly and at a fraction of the cost. Moreover, wireless can virtually eliminate the operational overhead associated with adds, moves, and changes to the campus network.
Wireless Challenges in Higher Education
As universities migrate from hotspot to campus-wide deployments, and the perception of wireless changes from a "nice-to-have" to a transformational technology, network administrators will experience significant growing pains. The campus environment presents unique challenges for Wi-Fi technology, including:
Dense User Environments Throughout the Campus
In Wi-Fi networks, clients contend for access to a shared medium. As the number of active users increases, performance typically degrades due to increased collision rates among clients seeking access. This poses a serious challenge for the university with a number of locations where the user population is dense, such as classrooms, libraries, labs, dormitories, and other common areas. To address higher density areas, access points are typically placed at a closer spacing. However, this creates co-channel interference especially for 802.11b or 802.11g deployments, where only three non-overlapping channels are available. Access points are placed closer together to take advantage of higher data rates, increasing the speed at which clients transmit data. However, access point RF propagation does not stop at the desired data rate.1 This means that even careful planning to avoid adjacent APs having the same channel will not avoid the problem of co-channel interference.
Expansive Campus With Dynamic User Requirements
University campuses are typically large sites, consisting of dozens of buildings sprawled across hundreds of acres. Wireless LAN deployments are typically phased in over time, necessitating on going changes to the network design. The wireless deployment may also be modified as higher user densities are experienced, or new applications are deployed. These changes to the wireless LAN design are extremely complicated to plan, with potential ripple effects on the existing deployment, due to the limited number of non-overlapping channels available.
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