University of New England offers wireless education
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PORTLAND, MAINE - How do you easily wire six lecture halls, libraries and classroom buildings for Internet and e-mail access at a 169-year-old New England university? You don't.
Susan Mellady, IT director at the University of New England in Portland, opted for 802.11b-based wireless LAN technology from Enterasys Networks instead of hardwiring several campus buildings. She also managed to save thousands of dollars in the process.
"We needed a way to get students online without having to go in and hard-wire the whole university," she says.
Demand for ubiquitous net access originated from the university's osteopathic medical school students, who are required to have a laptop, with most of their course materials posted online.
"Adjusting to the mobility of our students was definitely the biggest challenge," she adds.
Mellady installed 18 RoamAbout wireless access points in six buildings throughout the campus. Students and staff can purchase RoamAbout LAN laptop adapters at the university bookstore, and the school's IT department installs and configures them.
RoamAbout wireless access points are placed high in open areas of campus buildings to provide a connection range of about 100 feet per unit. They are also positioned in an overlapping configuration to let students roam from the range of one device to another and stay connected.
Besides the mobility advantage that RoamAbout gear provides the 150-plus wireless users, Mellady says the cost savings over using wired network equipment is the biggest advantage. She estimates she would have spent almost $18,000 per room to have the buildings hard-wired, not to mention the cost of network equipment she would have had to add to aggregate those wired ports.
"An access point is about $1,000," she says. "It costs about $5,000 to $6,000 for an [Enterasys] SmartSwitch [6000], and that's just for the switch. That doesn't even account for wiring or the cards that go into the switch."
The access points require a Category 5 cable, which supplies electrical power and network connectivity to an Enterasys SmartSwitch 6000 LAN switch in each building. The SmartSwitch 6000s aggregate traffic from the RoamAbout devices as well as SmartSwitch 2000s, which connect wired clients in faculty and staff offices.
A SmartSwitch 9000 serves as the school's backbone switch and connects users to an e-mail server and the Internet.
Mellady plans to install RoamAbout access points in three more buildings that are being renovated. Because some of the buildings are almost a century old, modern network wiring is even less feasible.
"We're not even going to bother with Category 5 cabling at all in those halls," she says.
In addition to the general campus buildings, the university's dental school uses the RoamAbout technology in an oral hygiene clinic where students train to clean teeth.
Student clinicians access a dental patient management application called Dentrix, which runs on a Windows NT server in the clinic and provides a scheduling calendar, patient history and billing data. The application is accessed from eight Dell PCs that are fitted with RoamAbout PCI LAN adapters so they can be easily moved from chair to chair.
"A station can be unplugged from a wall and brought to where it's needed," Mellady says. "Students can then look up and enter data right there at the chair with the patient."
Mellady says it would have been expensive and impractical to wire each work area in the 40-seat clinic for network access.
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