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Intel Ranks Colleges with Best Wireless Access
newdamage writes "Intel recently released it's ranking of The Most Unwired College Campuses and I was happy to see my school, Purdue, up there at #2. I can personally attest that my laptop w/ wireless card can be used over almost all of the main campus, and there's always a few people in lecture using laptops to access notes and take extra notes. Granted all I've found is that internet access in class just gives me a better way to not pay attention. What are other peoples' experiences with wireless access on their campus? Is there widespread coverage, and if so, does it help you get more school related work done by having your laptop connected where ever you are on campus?"
Wonderful what kind of technology they are teaching there? Obviously not wireless computers :P
The most UNWIRED? The wording almost makes that sound like a bad thing. Intel should have gone with CowboyNeal's headline.
Rapidly approaching the Zener knee...
is that now they can choose schools based on those that are willing to offer them their porn how they want it, where they want it. And they want it.
Are the Most Unwired Airports and Most Unwired Cities lists.
Also, do these lists just count wireless access points that Centrino supports? It almost sounds like some sort of propaganda...
EVERYDAY IS CATURDAY
Funny, I never would have thought Indiana would have the top two spots.
Sure, we're number 97, but at least we made the list. Take that number 98!
An effective signature identifies a particular user amongst a base of thousands.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Microsoft ranks colleges with Best Windows/Office/Visual Studio education?
I don't usually bring my laptop into class, as I find it too distracting, as the submitter of the story mentioned. I found that trying to write notes and any of my own key words to accompany the information were crucial to triggering memories when it came time to remember the information later on. The few times I brought in my laptop, I always ended up doing something else and felt I'd missed some important piece of information during the lecture. Unfortunately I type faster than I can write, so I guess there's a tradeoff.
Since I have housing in the Technology Quarters, I had some experience with the wireless network which was installed here early, but it was only with a PDA and not a full laptop. My room had poor reception, and I couldn't get a signal in any interesting places (like outside on the sun roof or patio). I'm hoping that next year when there's more access points up my new dorm will have better reception, particularly in the nice courtyard area.
Oh, and the network looks unencrypted so far. Which means I'll be checking my email with Pine over ssh. =b
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
you kids these days have it all.
back in my day, if you wanted to download porn, you had to wait until your roommate left for class, and then search for it on usenet. and if you got a single download that wasn't corrupt, you'd consider yourself lucky! nowadays with bittorrent and kazaa, life is so easy. if i had wireless access campus-wide, i might have spent alot more time in the classroom (my apartment had the four of us on a single dialup connection).
But my partners in several group projects do, and they have come in handy many times when brainstorming to quickly assess the feasibility of our ideas right there. Granted, it could also be done in one of the public labs, but it is far more convenient to be able to work anywhere on campus. Plus, you don't have to deal with all the dirty looks from the people in the labs who are trying to concentrate. After just two semesters, I'm convinced, for the first time, that I could put a laptop to good use _as_ a laptop. Unfortunately, that doesn't make me able to afford one:)
My institute, the University of Idaho, made #33, but there's only wireless access in the Commons (like the student union, except more full of offices), the library, and the Administration buildings. Though to be fair there's a bunch of classes in the Admin. The cooler part is that there's IBM laptops available for checkout that are all wireless internet-enabled at both the library and the commons, available in two-hour blocks, with wireless printer access too--makes it easy to get a burger and print off the chemistry pre-lab before you have to go do it, heh.
I'm on a road shaped like a figure eight; I'm going nowhere but I'm guaranteed to be late.
I'm a bit puzzled as where they came up with these numbers. I'm a grad student at William & Mary, which they placed in the top 50, and I find that wireless coverage is pretty spotty here. Meanwhile, at my undergrad alma mater U. Tenn, Knoxville, wireless access even covers a bunch of the *agriculture* campus, yet it doesn't make the list at all.
No surprise -- makers of lists like these don't usually attempt to apply any scientific methodology.
I have found that in class, all a laptop does is distract the students. Sure, we're supposed to follow along with the notes on our screens, but the prof can't see them. 90% of the time, everyone is surfing the web, talking on IM, checking their email, playing CS, basically everything but paying attention.
Further, most classes don't even require/use a laptop (it's pretty tough to take linear algebra notes on a computer). I estimate that maybe only 20% of classes or less use laptops actually IN class.
Most of the time when your laptop is required for class, it is just a pain to drag it to class, set it up, not use it for anything but to click through powerpoint slides. However, for the few professors who actually design the class with the use of the student's laptops in mind, it can be a great learning tool. It's nice doing in-class activities where you collect data and display it on your computer changing parameters to see the effect; or running simulations were you get to mess with the settings/initial conditions.
On the whole, I wished I could have saved a grand or so and purchased a desktop that could do the same as my laptop (after all, it spends all but 4 hours a week just sitting on my desk). For the, mmm, maybe 2 classes that the professor has actually incorperated the use of laptop into his lecture (same professor for both classes), it was a very powerful tool. Unfortunately, professors who know how to lecture well, especially incorperating a personal computer, are few and far between. An Unwired (or Wired) classroom can either be a great benefit, or a waste of time.
Oddly enough, even though Intel is into promoting WiFi, they don't seem to want to encourage WiFi on their own campuses as much as they might.
I've heard that at Intel your manager has to get you permission to use WiFi and your department must pay some sort of ongoing fees to some other group for the priviledge.
I attend the University of Alabama in Huntsville, which has an atrocious track record on networking issues.
Our Network Services department, despite repeated requests from faculty and students, has not set up any sort of wireless coverage anywhere on campus. They also prohibit faculty and students from setting up their own wireless equipment, whether or not it is connected to their network. I am not permitted to put a wireless NIC in my desktop and have it talk to my laptop, even if neither machine is on the campus network.
(I figure that since I'm allowed to use a cordless telephone operating in the 2.4GHz band, Network Services has no right to dictate what other signals I generate in that band.)
Any Slashdotters who are pondering attending this university should think carefully about whether they are willing to accept the complete lack of wireless and consistent 15-25% packet loss on the dormitory connections. (People use dialup because it's more reliable.)
In contrast, a friend of mine in Washington University Law School frequently IM's me from class lamenting how boring class is. (How someone can be bored with a computer (with 3d card) and network access in front of them is left as an exercise to the reader.)
This is pointless, #29 is LSU, where I went. I setup the wireless there. Yes, I, 1 person. It was 2 airports in the library.
I really don't see how you could improve Carnegie Mellon's wireless network. I have never been anywhere on campus where I couldn't get a strong signal. There are even power outlets everywhere - even outside - for the "weak-batteried". Bringing your laptop to class is as normal as bringing a pencil. Check out CMUSky, it gives great statistics about Andrew in real-time.
I got to Kansas State (#47 on the list incidentally) and the only reason I looked at the site was to see if my school even made it and if so, question the integrity of the list.
K-State technically has wireless in some buildings, but not many. Yes, the library and union have wireless as do a few others, but that's where it ends. The biology and physics buildings both lack it entirely, as does the main building for the college of arts and sciences and only a large lecture hall in one of the main engineering buildings is listed as having it. Since it was installed I might have taken one or two courses that would have made it available to me. I don't have a wireless laptop myself (although my girlfriend does and I've been interested in how good the coverage is), but I doubt you'd be able to get online from anywhere outside on campus at all.
Essentially this is something they did about 2 years ago and then more or less have ignored ever since. The website for it lists that more locations will be coming, but in that time none ever have. IT out here is a joke though. Bandwidth in the dorms was so bad (i.e. >2k/sec) a few years back that almost every single student living in them had to sign a petition about it before we barely got some degree of improvement (up to maybe 10-20k/sec). The IT staff is frequently unreachable having locked themselves off in the library basement and rarely if ever respond to e-mail.
The presence of K-State on that list seems to indicate that the list compilers merely looked over webpages and cataloged the number of areas listed without any regard for the actual coverage provided.
"I'm really tired of the Universities on the West/East coasts pissing on the Midwest Universities."
Reminds me of a joke...
"Which way do I leave from?"
"Here at Harvard, we don't use prepositions to end our sentences."
"Alright. Which way do I leave from, asshole?"
(Purdue, thinking were better than the people who think they are better than us since 1869.)
-- the computer doesn't want any beer, no matter how much you think it does. NEVER, EVER feed your computer beer.
... and I asked him about this very same topic. Funny, because he said "Have you seen the Intel article about the most wired college campuses?" Of course, I hadn't at the time and forgot to look it up. Then, bam, on Slashdot two days later.
I asked him to compare our setup and implementation to our peer universitites and he basically said that we were right at the top. We've had full coverage on campus for three semesters (counting back including this one). Before that they rolled it out over three semesters. So, it's been on campus for about 3 yrs now. Kinda cool.When ITAP (the IT services dept) decided to do it, they actually rolled together three other independant implementations from the School of Mgmt and a couple of other places. In addition to full campus coverage, now we even have wireless access at our footbal stadium (with a ton of money donated by Cisco and other companies) that can be used to access stats, etc. during the game - mostly from PDAs.
Funniest part of the story from the VP of IT was that when he told us that IU was number 1 on the list. Apparently, after Purdue had rolled out wireless across the campus (or was partly through implementation), IU called and asked how they did it and copied the setup. He said that they beat us on 'green space'. IU's physical campus is spread out over a larger area than Purdue's. IU covered the green space and nudged us out.