Monday, October 9, 2000

The Wireless Revolution By FLORENCE OLSEN From Fairbanks, Alaska, to Hattiesburg, Miss., students returning for classes this fall found that many of their campuses had been invisibly altered during the summer. Dozens of colleges set up their first wireless networks, giving students The first of four stories in a series Tuesday: SUNY's Morrisville Campus Sees Wireless Computing as a Way to Create a Niche Wednesday: Universities Find Wireless Systems Bring Them Convenience and Savings Thursday: Carnegie Mellon Works to Make Computers Invisible and Pervasive and faculty members who have laptop computers the ability to connect to the college network and the Internet from anywhere on campus. If still not exactly "must haves," wireless networks are no longer strictly experimental, either. "Colleges are starting to do it, mainly for convenience," says Scott A. Gelber, a network-security manager at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. The new networks are still no match for the speed or security of a wired infrastructure. But wireless networks have their own virtues, and colleges are building them with the expectation that the networks will enhance teaching, learning, and research. "With the wireless network, you're always in touch with your information," says Tracy Futhey, vice provost for computing services at Carnegie Mellon University. On its Pittsburgh campus, students and faculty members used to fret regularly about updating files that got "out of sync" when they worked offline. Now, users can work online whether they are in a library or the food court of the student center. Like any new technology, wireless networks appear to be solving some problems, but creating others. Colleges say they are saving money on electronic-cabling costs, and the networks are well suited to collaborative learning. Using conferencing software, for instance, freshman composition students anywhere on campus can form small groups online to practice writing for an audience of critical peers. Bill Stover Students at Greenville College, which has wireless connections, use their laptops outside. But maintaining control over wireless networks and preventing electronic snooping are proving to be headaches for campus administrators. And colleges, along with the vendors of wireless equipment, still have much to learn about designing wireless networks. Computing officials say a technical standard adopted last year marked the turning point for campus wireless networks. In September 1999, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers adopted IEEE 802.llb, a set of technical specifications for building wireless network components that most manufacturers since then have followed. As was the case years ago with competing videotape standards, once one standard triumphed, the technology became a less risky investment, says Charles R. Bartel, the director of operations for computing services at Carnegie Mellon. About the same time the engineers agreed on a single standard, prices for wireless-network components began to drop. On a wireless campus, portable computers and even some desktop PC's are equipped with communications cards called wireless adapters. The adapter contains the electronics and antenna for sending and receiving signals from boxes called "access points." Technicians install the access points on the interior and exterior walls of campus buildings. Each access point, typically the size of a book, houses a transmitter, a receiver, an antenna, and a piece of equipment that acts as a bridge to the campus's wire-based network. A single access point can serve many users. Depending on the type of computer tasks they need to accomplish, Mr. Bartel says, up to 30 students at a time can connect to the network through the same wireless access point by simply logging onto the network. As more people connect, however, each person gets a smaller share of the bandwidth -- which translates to a slower network connection. But a student with hiswireless PC antenna can be several hundred feet from an access point and remain connected to the network, because the wireless radio signal carries through walls, floors, and ceilings. After deciding that wireless had become a practical option, University of Southern Mississippi computing officials have spent the past six months installing and testing a wireless network. Instead of rewiring 30 older buildings on campus, they began setting up 300 wireless access points in those buildings and in 72 others. "The cost to retrofit those buildings with current, modern wiring for a network was very high," says Scott Montgomery, the university's director of technology infrastructure. The price for putting in a wireless network was "a small fraction of that," he says. Southern Miss officials estimated the average price for upgrading the wiring in a single building was $75,000, compared with an average price of $9,000 for wireless coverage of a single building. Their project plans call for spending $918,000 to install 600 wireless access points, at an average density of six per building. Using the $75,000 average, Mr. Montgomery says, the university would have paid about $7.6-million to rewire 102 buildings, a price that did not include the network connections between buildings. Mark Cain, the executive director of information services and support at the College of Mount Saint Joseph, in Cincinnati, solicited bids on both wireless and wired networks for one floor of a residence hall and found it was "$18,000 cheaper to do wireless" -- a 40-percent saving. Today, prices for a single access point from several of the top wireless equipment vendors are below $1,000, and colleges pay an average of roughly $1,000 to run a power cable and data wire to each access point. Wireless adapters for laptops are about $100 each, which typically the students purchase themselves. Although they originally operated at much lower speeds, wireless local-area networks today run at 11 megabits per second. A student might wait about two seconds for a typical image file to open up, if the file is transferred across the network at a rate just under 11 megabits per second. The next generation of wireless networks will run at rates up to 54 megabits per second. Even at that speed, says Edwin Craft, the telecommunications manager at Southern Miss, wireless networks will still pale in speed comparisons with the university's 622-megabit-per-second fiber-optic backbone. (On their desktops, some users of the wired network get up to 155 megabits per second. At that network speed, a typical image file would open up in less than one-tenth of a second.) But many administrators believe the advantages of being mobile and still connected to the campus network outweigh any disadvantages of speed. Mobility is the key point. Wireless networks are helping some colleges create what they call "nomadic" learning environments. "Our students can learn at the location that's best for them," says Jean L. Boland, the assistant vice president for technology services at the State University of New York's College of Agriculture and Technology at Morrisville, which became a wireless campus last fall. "On our campus, I would say wireless is a 'must have.'" Not everyone sees an inexorable move to laptops and wireless networks on every college campus, however. The president of Johnson C. Smith University, a historically black university, says her institution has experimented with wireless technology during registration. But having just completed a major upgrade of the wired infrastructure -- the 1,500-student university has 3,000 Ethernet ports -- Johnson C. Smith "won't be going wireless for some time," says Dorothy Cowser Yancy, the president. "If you look at the digital-divide issue for minority students, it's been an issue of access," Ms. Yancy says, "not of wireless access." And colleges' enthusiasm for wireless computing has been tempered by concerns about security and privacy -- for good reason. Because radio frequencies are shared among users of the network, any information sent or received over a wireless network can be intercepted. Radio frequencies often "leak" into adjacent parking lots or other properties that are not part of a campus, creating opportunities for intruders to get onto the campus network. "It's not only possible -- if you're not careful, it's guaranteed," says Gregory A. Jackson, the chief information officer at the University of Chicago, which has been keeping an eye on other institutions' wireless experiences. Carnegie Mellon advises its students and faculty members concerned about privacy to use encrypted applications, in addition to the encryption that authenticates users when they initially log on to the network. "Wireless networks themselves should be considered insecure networks from the standpoint that almost anyone can come in and snoop," Mr. Bartel says. Campus administrators admit they have a host of other worries about wireless networks, too. The networks are difficult to design, they place more demands on notebook batteries, and they force administrators to write new policies. "Wireless design is easier than it was four years ago, but it is still a fairly manually intensive process," Mr. Bartel says. The types of materials used in a building's construction must be factored into a network design for it -- along with the thickness of concrete floors, the number of metal desks and file cabinets and books it contains, and even the number of people expected to use the rooms. People, he says, are "six-foot columns of water" with a tendency to absorb and weaken the wireless radio signals. Because of such factors, wireless networks must be designed, for the most part, after buildings are built and occupied, Mr. Bartel says. The process is complex and three-dimensional, which is why Carnegie Mellon wants to put what it has learned into a computerized simulation tool. Its researchers are working with Lucent Technologies, the manufacturer of the university's wireless equipment, to create a computer program that would eliminate the design guesswork. Computing officials who have gained some experience with wireless networks say that many design problems can be solved by varying the location of access points when they are installed on adjacent floors, varying the radio-frequency settings of adjacent access points, and adjusting receiver thresholds. Carnegie Mellon has also had to create acceptable-use policies for the campus "airspace." Competing wireless devices such as cordless phones, audio speakers, or even Apple AirPort access points that operate at 2.4-gigahertz frequencies are not permitted on campus if they cause interference that disrupts the network. On the other hand, wireless experts say the limited battery life of notebook computers is not the barrier to wireless computing that it once was. Yet computing officials still advise students and faculty members to carry extra batteries if they want to run solely off battery power and stay connected wirelessly throughout most of the day. Almost as challenging as designing the networks is the matter of paying for them. Mount Saint Joseph, a private college, took on debt to pay for its wireless network, handheld P.C.'s, and application servers. The college signed a $2.5-million lease-purchase agreement through a state higher-education leasing program. Mount Saint Joseph officials expect that, in four years, the handheld P.C. program will become self-sustaining with the $250 technology fee that every student pays each semester. Some research institutions are luckier. If they can offer technical assistance to the manufacturers of wireless devices, the institutions often receive free equipment. Lucent Technologies gave 400 access points and 400 wireless adapters to Carnegie Mellon, in exchange for the voluntary engineering expertise of students and faculty members who were willing to try out the wireless components before they became mainstream. Six years earlier, the National Science Foundation paid for the university's first wireless network with a $500,000 grant. In 1999, Greenville College, in Illinois, received $200,000 in state grants that paid for its purchase of Aironet access points from Cisco Systems and for upgrading its wired infrastructure. But many colleges, including SUNY-Morrisville, are using institutional dollars and student technology fees -- "real college money" -- to pay for the networks, Ms. Boland says. Mr. Jackson, at Chicago, says it is anybody's guess whether notebook P.C.'s or some other type of small handheld devices will eventually be the way students prefer to use wireless networks. He also questions whether urban universities such as Chicago need to build their own wireless networks. He notes that commercial communications companies are building nationwide wireless data networks from which colleges might buy services -- instead of building networks of their own. Administrators also acknowledge that it is too early to know whether requiring wireless laptops will relieve the pressure on colleges to keep building computing labs and multimedia classrooms. Computing officials at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute think that an infusion of laptops and wireless networks may accelerate a trend away from college-owned, general-purpose desktops in student computer labs. In the future, computer labs mainly will be places where students go to use more specialized machines, such as graphical and computational workstations, says John E. Kolb, R.P.I.'s dean of computing and information services. But Seton Hall University, which for several years has required its students to own laptops, has reported seeing an increase, rather than a decrease, in student demand for labs with general-purpose desktop computers. Mandatory laptops and pervasive wireless networks could also reduce the need for expensive multimedia classrooms with fixed desks or tables. All new classrooms at SUNY-Morrisville will be wireless, Ms. Boland says. Colleges will still need video projectors and document cameras with which faculty members can display documents and show information on large computer screens. But classrooms with raised floors for concealing the data wires and power cables probably will not be needed in the future, she says. On some campuses, wireless projects have started out small, limited initially to a library, a student center, or a single department. The University of Florida recently built its first wireless classroom, which will be used by computer-science and engineering students. Colorado State University and the Rochester Institute of Technology have installed wireless networks in their main libraries. Columbia University's computer-science department has its own wireless network. Similar networks have been built to serve the Graduate School of Management at the University of California at Davis, and the School of Hygiene and Public Health at the Johns Hopkins University. Vanderbilt University is creating a wireless network for its medical center and main campus, and Howard University and Rockford College are also in the process of bringing wireless connectivity to their campuses. At other places, entire campuses are already covered by what network engineers call "a wireless cloud." In almost every case, smaller colleges have been first -- ahead of large universities -- in actually installing and using campuswide wireless networks. Greenville's wireless connections reach all classrooms, residence halls, the gymnasium, the library, administrative offices, the dining hall, and even open areas on the campus quadrangle. "Everywhere on campus you can wander around and be continuously connected," says Rex Catron, the director of information technology for the college, which has a 24-acre campus. This semester, about 500 Greenville students and college employees are using the wireless network. Carnegie Mellon's wireless network, which has $1-million worth of components, covers the entire 100-acre Pittsburgh campus -- with the exception of the dormitories, which have wired-network connections. But the university is working with Lucent Technologies to test a new access server that would let it expand the wireless network's coverage to several dormitories off campus. "We're also beaming some wireless coverage to an adjacent city park that is used by the campus community," Mr. Bartel says. For the fall semester, Carnegie Mellon has 2,000 registered users on the wireless network, up from 1,000 a year ago. In time, university officials say they hope to have the entire campus community of 10,000 connected to the wireless infrastructure. Carnegie Mellon officials experimented with wireless technologies for six years before the industry got together and agreed on a technical standard -- and while Carnegie Mellon experimented, other institutions watched. "We love having them there, trying this stuff," says Chicago's Mr. Jackson, a longtime observer of campus-computing trends. "They're often our laboratory for things like this." His own institution, which has not yet begun a large-scale wireless project, hopes to learn from the experiences of early adopters like Carnegie Mellon, says Mr. Jackson. During the next two years, he says, wireless campus networks are "the big thing that's going to happen." Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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