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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Apparently Duke hasn't
Apparently Duke hasn't learned from the previous snafu with inferior Cisco wireless gear causing flooding of the network and there's the question of seamless handoff for voice, scalability and so forth. Duke is off the list as one of the places I'll be sending my kids. If they can't even implement decent WIFI how can I expect them to teach academics.
"If they can't even
"If they can't even implement decent WIFI how can I expect them to teach academics."
That is such a ridiculous comment. Yawn.
Would you trust a car
Would you trust a car mechanic whose own car regularly breaks down? For the same reason why would anyone enroll their kids in a school that implements broken technology that performs poorly for applications such as VOIP or multicast video and doesn't scale in highly concentrated areas such as lecture halls and study areas? To scale in a micro cell you have to add more access points but adding more causes performance issues where you run into diminishing returns. It doesn't take an IT guy to realize this. Cisco is immunity for inept schools.