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CWRU Opens Largest Wi-Fi Net
server1 writes "In what could be the largest public wireless service in the world, Case Western Reserve University is opening more than 1,230 Cisco Aironet 1200 Series wireless access points on September 1, providing free Internet access to faculty, students, staff and visitors to the Case campus and University Circle." Good news for Clevelanders looking for some free wireless internet access.
University of Akron's also got very good wireless coverage, and they push laptops rather heavily. It was so terribly convenient. I'm not going there anymore, alas... I miss it. The speed was really blazing, and nothing compares to the ability to actually be online looking up information related to your lectures while they're happening... can make for a much greater understanding of the material.
Alas, my current school has some kind of fledgling deal going on, but so far I haven't even been able to get it to work, and they aren't very good about providing information on it.
Just a little heads up to anyone who might be thinking of going there, living in the dorms and doing anything but web browsing on your computer:
I just graduated from there this month. I agree, the wireless is good. Unfortunately however, they also put that campus-wide firewall in place that would make Hitler seem liberal. I'm in the computer science club there. I hear plenty of complaints from students who are trying to use the campus network for useful things (ie, services) but can't. Even some video games aren't playable.
Certainly don't try making any special requests to the IT department. To them, the students are like a disease. I lived in the dorms my first three semesters there, before the network nazis put up the campus wide firewall. I very humbly requested a reverse DNS entry pointing to a hostname in a domain I owned. I got a very bitchy response back about how anything in 130.101/16 "represents" uakron.edu and it was incorrect to have PTRs going to any other domains. I then requested any DNS entry at all (because at the time they had no DNS entries for any dorm net addresses). After about a week they put one in place.
Also, our student senate representative found out that they log all network traffic at border and store it for some time. If the RIAA or federal government ever comes a knockin', your ass and every bit of information they have on you will be in the sling faster than you can blink. You may have heard stores about universities refusing to turn student information over to the RIAA on request. Well, this is no such university, trust me.
And then they had the nerve to apply this "technology fee" to our tuition, after making the network LESS usable than before.