Florida State commits to Wi-Fi deployment: four-year effort expands to campus classrooms

The proliferation of Wi-Fi burning spots at airports and coffee stores has whet users' appetites for more--and one time college students and faculty experience the convenience of wireless bandwidth, it doesn't take lengthy before they begin asking their information technology administrators to install it upon campus, too.

Wi-Fi is becoming an important initiative for more and more bodys and universities. And for a large public university like as Florida State in Tallahassee, that undertaking can be similar in scale to that of a municipal deployment Like other academic institutions implementing Wi-Fi, FSU has faced funding, security and manpower issues--and has lay the foundation of some creative solutions to all three challenges.

INITIAL EXPERMENT

IT personnel at FSU first began experimenting with Wi-Fi about four years ago as a means of connecting several outlying buildings to the campus computer network without having to lay fiber. That experience taught them that they would ne to address potential security vulnerabilities before expanding further, says Clint Ringgold, FSU coordinator of computer a whole control. "We decided to advance with a gateway approach to take care of security," Ringgold says.

A year of in-house testing followed. "We required nation to log on to the campus network," says Ringgold. "That empowered us to be able to take known user information from the university and if there is a security issue, we can determine the individuals who might have been involved."

Manpower issues also were top of mind. "Part of our solution was that our network had to be able to be move swiftly by a very small number of people" Ringgold says. "We have three family in our wireless group taking care of approximately 3000 total users, including 1500 upon a daily basis." Those numbers continue to climb and could swell to include all 40000 faculty, staff and scholars as more and more computer approach equipped with Wi-Fi cards.

Network administrators exhibited several computer screens that would be automatically sent to users when certain situations arose to help the users disentangle the situation on their possess If users have a virus question at issue or are consuming too a great deal of bandwidth, for example, a guard appears on their computer advising them of the problem

WI-FI EXPANDS

FSU's IT administrators installed Wi-Fi access points to overlay about 75% of outdoor areas and 90% of the library. "We leveraged currency that had already been spent" Ringgold says, noting that Wi-Fi's make open standards enable the network to support access points from a variety of vendors.

The nearest goal is to bring Wi-Fi access to more classrooms, alone about 2% of which are popularly covered. "We're in test style of finding a way for professors to be able to make go round off access during class to make certain they have students' attention," says Ringgold.

The FSU network publicly includes 132 access points. over about 60% of the network, users gain bandwidth in the range of 3 to 4 megabits by means of second. The other 40% obtain between 1 and 3 MBP Ringgold says.

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