Monday, June 12, 2000

Drexel U. Will Offer Wireless Network Connections Across Campus By SCOTT CARLSON Drexel University, in Philadelphia, announced during its commencement Saturday that the entire campus -- aside from the dormitories -- would be outfitted with wireless Internet connections by this fall. Students and faculty members will be able to walk from the library across a grassy plaza to class, the armory, or elsewhere on the campus's 22 acres, and never stop bidding on eBay. "Our concept is that you can roam anywhere," says John A. Bielec, vice president of information resources and technology at Drexel. "A laptop will be like a cell phone." Drexel says that it will be the first to establish a fully wireless campus, but it has competition. Most buildings at Carnegie Mellon University are already wireless. This summer, that university plans to put up antennas that will fill the gaps in the campus's outdoor spaces. Constantine Papadakis, Drexel's president, hopes that the wireless system will be an attractive "convenience" for students and faculty members. He says that the university first looked into wireless connections four years ago. In 1997, he says, "we tried to project what trends are evident in tech so that we can be at the cutting edge when they turn into a reality. We felt that wireless was at the head of that trend." "From a philosophical standpoint, the easier you make the access to computers and computing, the more computers will be used in education," he says. "This will make computer labs obsolete, because students can connect in any classroom, anywhere on campus." Drexel first provided wireless connections in its library in 1998, offering laptops with wireless adapters that students could check out and use within the building. That program was so popular that the university began offering wireless computing in other buildings as well. This summer, the university will finish installing 150 "access points," transmitters fixed to walls inside buildings, and about 20 antennas outside, that will cover the campus in a single network, allowing users to roam across access zones. Mr. Bielec estimates that the wireless additions will cost $650,000. The access points and antennas will be connected to Drexel's existing wired network, on which the university has spent $5-million over the last five years. The wireless connections will be about 200 times as fast as a typical modem, although not as fast as an Ethernet connection through a jack in the wall. Wireless connections can also slow down when several people are sharing one access point. "But you can fix that by adding more access points, which are cheap," Mr. Bielec says. Access points cost about $2,000 each. Drexel's technicians also have plans to make the campus's wireless connections secure. The university will use 128-bit encrypted radio frequencies, the most secure encryption available, Mr. Bielec says. The university's students, who are required to purchase a computer before enrolling, will also have to buy wireless adapters for their laptops. The adapters retail for about $175. Drexel's dormitories will not have wireless access, Mr. Bielec says, because students there already have several places to plug in. "It just doesn't make sense to go wireless inside the dorms, but outside of them, everything will be wireless," he says. "That was our original thought, too," says Jay L. Dominick, Wake Forest University's assistant vice president for information systems. But today, on a campus that is working toward becoming wireless, Wake Forest's dormitories have more wireless access than most other parts of the campus. "We found that students wanted that convenience," says Mr. Dominick. "They didn't want to route the cables around their furniture, or they wanted to take their laptops to the study lounge. That was a surprise to us. We had to go back and add a significant number of access points." Meanwhile, Wake Forest hasn't added as many access points to its classrooms. "So far, we haven't seen the demand in the classroom, because people can just connect there through jacks in the wall anyway," Mr. Dominick says. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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