HANOVER, N.H. - Each freshman class at Dartmouth College is unique, but this year's crop has at least one thing in common with other classes across the country: a passion for wireless networks.

"No one wants to plug in anymore," says Brad Noblet, the school's director of technical services. About 90% of Dartmouth's freshmen arrived with wireless-enabled laptops.

Exploding wireless LAN traffic has been a grueling test for college network staffs this semester. Network infrastructures, security and management are all being stressed, and WLANs have become a prime vector for fast, and repeated, viral infections.

The new strains come as many schools are expanding WLAN coverage and embracing the next generation of the technology. Colleges are fleshing out access point infrastructures with security gateways from companies such as Bluesocket and Cranite Systems, and with wireless "switches" from companies such as Aruba Wireless Networks and Symbol Technologies.

They also are adding demanding new applications, such as wireless voice over IP.

Some schools are bringing the boost in WLAN traffic on themselves in the name of improving the quality of students' lives and education. For instance, American University in Washington, D.C., offered about 1,250 incoming freshman a special deal on built-in wireless notebooks from Dell and HP.

"We have a much higher [WLAN] adoption rate now," says Carl Whitman, executive director of e-operations. He doesn't have a firm number but thinks the vast majority of freshmen showed up with wireless-enabled laptops. "Our help desk staff assisted several hundred students to set up their wireless configurations during the first two weeks of orientation," he says.

The school's faculty is going wireless, too. About 150 of 550 faculty members now have WLAN access and 200 more will be wireless by year-end, he says.

Meeting the challenge

All this makes WLAN management a greater challenge. Though campuses have been streamlining and automating student PC configurations for several years, WLAN client cards and software drivers add to the support burden.

One complicated aspect is that the standard software package for student and faculty laptops - called the image - has to be tested to make sure it works properly on both wired and wireless networks. At the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in New York, the number of man-hours involved in this testing has surged by about 40% compared with last year.

"Most of the problems [for the network staff] are related to the client machines, their WLAN cards and configurations," says Brian Maroldo, technical director in the Office of IT at New York Institute of Technology in Manhattan. "It's hard to publish a 'how-to' guide for our students when there are so many hardware and software choices out there, each with its own setups and problems."

The school's solution is closer cooperation between its network operations team and academic computing lab, which have identified set-up parameters and the most-common "gotchas" for a variety of WLAN adapter cards.