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

Wireless and Academia, on the cheap?

[the grace of R'hllor]

It would be nice to see this *in* academia, too. The main thing holding it up (insofar it is currently held up) is price, which is certainly something students are concerned with.

While I obviously expect that it will get a bit cheaper, are there any companies out there that truly do focus on 'same bang, less buck', or are they all just trying to up both these factors at the same time?

Speaking from a student's standpoint, obviously.

Re:Security

[alphatool]

I go to a college at a university in Australia, and they have just spent AU $800,000 to secure our network. The efforts they have taken to secure the network this year have cost more than has been spent on the whole computer system in the past 14 years. In my mind this is damn stupid, because it took the IT club (in no way linked to the admin of the College) 13 min to bypass the new security measures, (while we were drunk(!)) This leads to the obvious question of why to bother. Can a system actually be made safe against people who really want to bypass it?

Coverage at UF

[numatrix]

We have a few hundred AP's on campus at UF, that cover a fairly large piece of a very large campus. The coverage map (mostly accurate) is online, as well as instructions on connecting.

The nice thing about the network here is that no mac registration is necessary. The wireless network is seperated from campus by filters that can only be broken through via VPN connection to the campus VPN server, or authenticated with their campus 'gatorlink' login. When we first developed the system, no commercial products existed to do what we needed (though today there are many); any web traffic is automatically redirected to the authentication server that allows the users to login with their campus login, and their mac is added to the auth table after a successful login. This makes the service easy to use, transparent, and compatible with just about every platform you can think of. Of course, no encryption by default if people choose to take that route, but that's why we offer the VPN as well.

some dartmouth background...

[blackdefiance]

While not exactly at the front of the pack on wireless, Dartmouth has had a number of interesting contributions to the field:

- DCTS/DTSS: Dartmouth developed an early timesharing system in the late 60's
- BASIC: Kemeney & Kurtz, a pair of professors, wrote Beginner's All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code in 1964. It's easy to dismiss BASIC, but a lot of people got their start with it.
- Synclavier: Jon Appelton, currently the head of Dartmouth's electroacoustic music program, developed this digital synth in '78 at New England Digital. It was widely used through the 90's.
- Networked Campus: Dartmouth adopted a "port for every pillow" philosophy in 1984 and wired the whole campus with appletalk. They got a lot of mileage out of that network.
- Required computers: Dartmouth has mandated computer ownership for all students since (i think) the class of '91. Having it mandatory means students can get financial aid for their computers, if necessary
- blitzmail: dartmouth wrote an email program in '84 (?). nothing amazing or groundbreaking, but the the widespread adoption of "blitz" in combination with the mandatory computers and ubiquitous networking had a huge effect on the campus social scene, and did a lot to bring dartmouth grads into the information age.

I'm sure there's more i'm missing here... anyone?

Re:some dartmouth background...

[annodomini]

I'm sure there's more i'm missing here... anyone?

AI. What many people see as the birthplace of AI is the 1956 Dartmouth Conference on AI. While there had been a few independent researchers working on related projects, the Dartmouth conference is where it turned into a field.

The reason why BASIC was developed was because Dartmouth required everyone to learn to program. I think Dartmouth may have been the first college to do that. Sadly, it's no longer required. The requirement now is that you have to take one technology related course.

And currently, you can look at where Dartmouth is currently moving in this field. The wireless is one thing. One of the big efforts is the Institute of Security Technology Studies, which is doing research into all kinds of information security, and the Public Key Infrastructure Lab, which is doing research into how to set up a secure public key infrastructure in an institutional environment like Dartmouth. Now, some people might say that this has all been solved, but one of the most difficult problems Dartmouth faces is the numerous untrusted public computers all around the campus. Key distribution in this environment is quite tricky, especially if you don't want to require all users to get extra hardware.