If you were on the fence about whether or not to deploy 802.11n, you should take a look at what Duke University is doing. It has signed with Cisco to create one of the largest wireless LAN so far announced for the draft IEEE standard. According to a story by Network World's John Cox, The university will blanket most of its Durham, N.C. campus, some 6 million square feet with Cisco’s Aironet 1250 two-radio access points. The move follows a limited pilot of the 1250 last fall, with the gear consistently achieving 130Mbps, writes Cox. Duke will also be test driving Cisco's "enhanced PoE", which the vendor launched in its 3750-E switches last month.

Duke is the latest in a string of 11n deployments in higher education, many of them campus-wide and consequently with hundreds of 11n access points. The first was Morrisville State College, Morrisville, N.Y., which has deployed more than 700 11n access points from Meru Networks. Wireless pioneer Carnegie Mellon University in December selected two WLAN vendors, Aruba and Xirrus, as its 11n suppliers for a phased WLAN upgrade that may in the end exceed Duke’s: CMU estimates it might end up with about 3.000 11n access points.

You'll remember that Duke has had its ups and downs with Cisco wireless networking gear. Last summer, after days of finger pointing and speculation in the blogosphere, Cisco admitted that it was a problem with its wireless network equipment that caused Duke's network to flood.when Apple iPhones were being used on campus.

We guess that the iPhones will have been one of the first items to be tested in the pilot 11n network.

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