With throngs of highly mobile users and multimedia-centric applications, universities are setting aside qualms about the pre-standard nature of today's available 802.11n products and moving ahead with installations.

Numerous announcements have been made in the past weeks about universities, including Duke, deploying pre-standard 802.11n enterprise-class products. One reason: Universities function partly in the role of service provider to students, who are arriving on campus from Web 2.0-esque home environments rife with social networking, online gaming and high expectations. So universities say they need all the bandwidth they can get to keep pace with this tech-savvy generation to compete.

University of Miami senior network engineer Diana Cortes, for example, says that about 35% of the university’s 10,000 undergraduate students have laptop cards that are 802.11n-capable. The university is moving forward with Meru gear for the 802.11n portion of the network, which is about 200 access points into a 525-AP installation.

Cortes says that she finds the Meru architecture, which is based on a so-called virtual-cell setup that places all access points on a single channel and Basic Service Set Identifier (BSSID), easier to deploy than others. “If you make a mistake, you don’t have do re-do all your channel planning,” she explains.

“And Meru’s controllers are the most stable,” adds Stewart Seruya, assistant VP of telecom and IT security at the university.

He says the high-throughput 11n is particularly required in the university’s medical school, which runs high-bandwidth imaging applications and wireless telephony, and in its school of nursing, where a high density of students concurrently take online exams and consume piles of bandwidth.

Meanwhile, Concordia University in Montreal is about 50 access points into a 200-access point pre-standard Cisco 11n rollout. At Concordia, Wi-Fi usage jumps 200% each term, says Andrew McAusland, associate VP of instructional and information technology services.

The university streams all sporting events to user laptops, consuming large chunks of bandwidth. It also offers students a “virtual desktop” Software-as-a-Service, which stores Microsoft Office applications, educational podcasts and videos, and the student’s data on the network. Students can access all their data and services from any Internet connection so long as they have a net name and password, McAusland says.

Joanie Wexler is an independent networking technology writer/editor in Silicon Valley.