How Ball State is moving from being a vendor testing ground to becoming a WiMAX-connected campus
Ball State graduate student Ryan Lasure explains how the university is moving from being a vendor testing ground to becoming a WiMAX-connected campus.
Ball State University for the past few years has been a key testing ground for WiMAX equipment vendors such as Cisco, Alvarion and DigitalBridge. Now the Muncie, Ind., university is looking at opening up its WiMAX network to more students.
WiMAX 2 coming in 2011?
Ryan Lasure, a 23-year-old Ball State student who is pursuing his Master’s degree in information and communications sciences, took some time this week to talk with Network World about the work Ball State does with its WiMAX network and how it plans to eventually open up the network to its 20,000 students to use for free.
How long has Ball State had its WiMAX network up and operational?
Our network first came online in 2006 and we started with the fixed WiMAX 802.16d standard. But within the last year, we’ve started using the mobile 802.16e WiMAX standard as well. So far we’ve mostly used it to help wireless providers and equipment companies like Cisco, Alvarion and DigitalBridge test their products and equipment. We basically test out their equipment and send reports back to them.
How much ground does the WiMAX network cover?
It covers about a 2-mile radius with five base stations. The base stations are all on campus, with four that point off campus and one that points downward onto campus. All of them are on university buildings so we don’t have to put any equipment on towers.
The network is currently being used by a limited number of student test subjects. Can you tell us what you’re testing?
We have what’s called a WiMAX usability study where we’ve recruited 150 student testers to use the WiMAX network. While initially we preferred to have students living within a half mile radius of the base stations, we’ve now allowed people in the 1- to 2-mile range to sign on as well. What we’re looking for in these tests is information on the user experience with the network and to see how good they feel their connection is based on both speed and reliability.
One experiment we did was a blind study where half of our users were dialed down to maximum download speeds of 1Mbps. We did this without telling them to see if they noticed a difference in their experience. Although most of the users said they were just using it for simple stuff such as basic Web browsing, we had around 25% to 30% of users who were using the network for bandwidth-intensive applications and Web sites. So when we looked at those users who would have traditionally said they got excellent speed, their perception of the network went from excellent to either adequate or poor. Because there are so few people on the network right now, the heavy users were used to getting speeds as high as 16Mbps. We conducted this experiment to gauge what user experiences would be if the network were to get more people on it.
How do you plan to spread the use of the WiMAX network beyond this initial testing group?
We have students working on business models right now to determine whether we should offer anyone on campus or off-campus access for free or whether we should charge them a fee that would be lower than what other ISPs would charge. We’re also working on determining what we should charge to businesses and others in the broader community if they wanted to use the network.
Why did Ball State decide to go with WiMAX instead of waiting for LTE to be more fully developed?
Ball State is very much interested in being on the cutting edge, and WiMAX is simply a more mature technology than LTE at the present time. We can actually deploy it and use it. I would definitely say that if we came into a relationship with someone who wanted us to test LTE as well, we would absolutely do it. But with WiMAX we have licensing to use 2.5GHz spectrum right now, while we don’t have licensing for the 700MHz spectrum that LTE would operate on. While we don’t directly own the rights to the 2.5GHz from the FCC, we do have an agreement with Clearwire and Sprint who let us use the spectrum for free when they’re not using it themselves.
Presuming the testing goes well, what applications will Ball State use the WiMAX network for in the future?
In the near term we’re interested in giving students living within a reasonable distance from campus access to the network for free. That will give us the ability to provide students and faculty with a wireless Internet connection they can use anywhere in the area. But as far as academic applications go, that’s something the university will have to decide on. What we’re trying to do is educate the university on what they can use the network for, and they can decide where to take things from there.
