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Wireless Everything at Dartmouth

Posted by timothy on from the breaking-ties dept.

hende_jman writes "Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire is condensing its phone, cable TV, and Internet services all into Wi-Fi, as reported by the New York Times (free registration required). The project, which started in 2001, has added 1400 WAPs and 24,000 wired ports. All that, and cost effective too."

4 of 187 comments (clear)

  1. this seems dumb by eobanb · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Wireless purely for the sake of wireless is just a stupid idea. I'm assuming they pretty much already have most of the infrastructure they need. Don't the dorms and offices and classrooms already have phone lines??? Also, the bandwidth of Wi-Fi is puny compared to gigE, which is what is required for some on-campus applications like streaming video (I'm a student at IU and we do things like that sometimes). Plus there's the whole security problem. This just seems like one big joke...

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  2. No, it's wireless CABLE TV by winkydink · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Now there's an oxymoron if I've ever seen one.

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    "I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey

  3. Let me get this straight by mattmentecky · · Score: 4, Insightful

    TFA:

    Hardware: Wireless Everything at Dartmouth Wireless Networking
    Posted by timothy on Wednesday May 04, @01:00PM
    from the breaking-ties dept.
    hende_jman writes "Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire is condensing its phone, cable TV, and Internet services all into Wi-Fi, as reported by the New York Times (free registration required). The project, which started in 2001, has added 1400 WAPs and 24,000 wired ports. All that, and cost effective too."

    Guess it depends what your definition of "wireless" and "everything" is.

  4. Re:Everything? by CyberDave · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Not to mention that that aggregate bandwidth of 11 Mbps or 54 Mbps is the bandwidth provided at the raw physical layer. Even when you get to layer 2, you lose a lot of that bandwidth due to all ACKs at the MAC layer, the various timers (inter-frame delays). Then add on top of that the retransmission of lots frames due to interference and you're down to less than 10 Mbps of bandwidth. I've seen data from Vivato that indicates that you get even less than that (around 5 Mbps) in real-world conditions on a 802.11g network. That's about 10% usable bandwidth. Shared. That's not nearly enough. That's enough for maybe one TV channel and nothing else. And don't get me started on the latency...