One Glimpse Of The Wireless Future

SemiBarbaricPrincess writes "Check out this story at wired.com about wireless networks on college campuses. The focus is on Dartmouth College." It would be great to see this kind of wireless community outside academia too.

Comments

Oh come on, now :-/

[ekrout]

Plenty of other schools [Bucknell, Penn State, Carnegie Mellon, Georgia Tech, U of Florida, ...] have had this stuff for a long time now.

Yes, the article's interesting if you're into networking and/or wireless data transmission, but their explicit focus on Dartmouth makes it seem as though they're unique and trendsetting. It's quite the contrary, however, as Dartmouth was in no way one of the first handful of schools to deploy 802.11b.

Kudos to Wired! for running a contemporary article that talks a lot about the current state of wireless/laptop/learning at top colleges, but I feel that could have at least given credit to other schools that were at least equally as deserving.

Thanks for listening.

The bad part about the idea....

[Bowie J. Poag]

Sooner or later, it's going to hit its saturation point. Just like with any other network.

The only problem with 802.11b is that you only have a relatively small range to work within. It doesn't take much to have so much traffic in the 2.4 GHz band that smaller wireless devices become useless in anything but Ad-Hoc mode. The future may not so much be in providing wireless technology as Dartmouth suggests, but in developing technologies that control the manner in which these devices communicate (e.g. some way to tell a client to use a different channel, switching, trunking, etc.)

Ich liefere Ihnen Licht und Kraft
Und ermögliche es Ihnen Sprache, Musik und Bild
Durch den Äther auszusenden und zu empfangen
Ich bin Ihr Diener und Ihr Herr zugleich
Deshalb hütet mich gut..
Mich, den Genius der Energie.

We're wired here, too!

[Erwos]

Here at University of Maryland at College Park, the Office of Information Technology has been pretty quick in rolling out 802.11b throughout campus. We're not at the magical 100% coverage point, but you can walk into most any building and find a spot with coverage. The entire outdoor mall is wireless, too - laying out on the grass on a sunny day while coding a CS project and doing some IM on your laptop is really nice :-).

I think that technology like this could be astoudingly useful in the classroom, and it saddens me a bit that we haven't really made any serious attempts to integrate it... money I suppose. Zapping notes and due dates into PDAs would be nice, at the minimum - cuts down on communication errors.

I predict we'll see serious usage of these technologies in 10 years - gotta give traditional educators some time to cope with them.

-Erwos

sorority girls 150mb/day == VoyeurDorm cam site

[Jaeger-]

CLEARLY these EKT girls are running a porn cam site from their sorority house...

The sisters of Epsilon Kappa Theta are definitely up to something. The wireless cards in the sorority house's computers each move an average of 222 Mbytes of data per day -- only one other spot on campus, an administrative building, moves more than 150 Mbytes a day per card. An MP3 server, perhaps? Maybe they're watching streamed video on a big-screen TV -- or using high-bandwidth Internet radio to supply the music for all-night parties. They could be trying to corner the market on Diesel jeans via sorority eshopping excursions, or running a molecular modeling program for a pharmaceutical company. We may never know for sure. Since the college has a strict policy against monitoring student computer use unless investigating complaints, university officials couldn't tell me what's going on. The sisters of EKT did not respond to my prying emails. So for now, their secret remains safe.

The sisters of Epsilon Kappa Theta are definitely up to something, moving an average of 1.3 Gbytes a day.