I was talking with David Bucciero, director of technical services for Dartmouth College. He’s an iPhone fan though he doesn’t own one himself, yet. That’s because AT&T currently only offers its EDGE network in the Hanover, NH area, while it works feverishly to expand its recently upgraded 3G network, mainly for iPhone users.
Dartmouth, like many other colleges and universities is seeing iPhones pop up as WLAN clients on their campus nets. There are about 50 iPhones at the school, and Bucciero says there have been no management or security issues with them, and that the iPhone is a well-behaved WLAN client, at least from the viewpoint of network administrators.
With the 3G net and the iPhone 3G, Bucciero says he expects to the number of iPhones soar, to perhaps 300 or more in short order. But what really gets him excited is the idea of running iPhone voice and data sessions over the campus WLAN, coupled with the expected influx of iPhone applications for enterprise users, due to the proliferating iPhone software development kit.
Why? Money. Or rather, saving money.
“This line item [in the budget] really jumps out at you,” Bucciero says.
It sure jumped out at me. The vast majority of those calls are being made to other people right on the Dartmouth campus, all of them within range of a WLAN access point. Right now, Dartmouth is trialing with IT staff 15 Nokia dual-mode phones, with both cellular and WLAN radios, and the cellular-WLAN voice appliance from Agito. Dartmouth has a Cisco-based VoIP infrastructure, built around Cisco Call Manager. SIP clients were loaded on the Nokia phones. Updated: Agito’s system senses whether Wi-Fi or cellular has the better signal and shifts the call to the appropriate network. Many of the calls that were cellular now run over the WLAN.
In late May, Dartmouth began testing Cisco 802.11n WLAN gear, to boost campus wireless throughput from about 20-24Mpbs at each access point to 150-180Mbps. “If that proves out, it’s a nice fit with 11n and FMC [fixed-mobile convergence],” Bucciero says.
Right now, he says, the iPhone is missing from this equation, an observation that is a succinct summary of the iPhone’s enterprise prospects. For example, to access the Dartmouth WLAN, clients require security certificates. Getting them to the iPhone has been a manual process. That seems to be changing with the July 11 release of the iPhone 2.0 software, which will include a Web or Mac-based client configuration utility and support for WPA2 Enterprise and 802.1x certification.
The key to iPhone, apart from its touch-screen wizardry, is the underlying MAC OS-based system software, according to Bucciero. “They can do everything with that,” he says. “But they’re doing it very carefully [because] they want to be sure the user has the best experience.”
Bucciero has been in talks with both Agito and Apple on what’s needed to include iPhones as part of the trend toward fixed-mobile phone convergence. His reading is that both are committed to making that happen.
But even he thinks numerous large-scale FMC deployments are several years out. I think it will be longer than that. [Update: Dave emailed me to clarify: “I believe Agitio’s solution is not in its infancy and [that] FMC may not be quite main stream yet but will be there very soon.” My own view still is that FMC will be at best a niche market for longer than that.]
