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College to Deploy First 802.11n Network
Matt writes "Morrisville State College, a New York State school in central New York, is partnering with Meru Networks and IBM to deploy the first 802.11n wireless network. They will be using around 900 access points and are planning to go live this fall."
900 access points. That's a lot.
Anyway, first post. Yo.
The second poster is gay btw.
54mbps isn't fast enough? I mean its not like your going to be accessing the internet with anything close to that. So the only benefit is better lan performance. Not to mention the standard isnt even official and subject to change and incompatibilities with future standard based equipment and this sounds like a waste of money.
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And they go straight to the next bleeding edge : 248 mbit.
_ Amendments
They have nearly filled the alphabet btw. Only 802.11z is still free as a name. Can you name them all ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/802.11n#Standard_and
Charlie Bravo 1537.......... Calling on all wardrivers to Morrisville Over and out * static*
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The **AA have already sent notices to reveal the people who are going to accessing one or more of the 900 access points. They're gonna sue every single one of them for possible future copyright violations.
09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63
It's 54 or 100+ mbps on paper. When I was using wifi (before I insisted on running cat5), it was just me and the base station seperated by 15 feet and one light wall. My actual connection speed (based on large file transfer to a server box, no other activity) was roughly 10 to 12 mbps, one fifth the claimed rate. So if they're supposed to get 100+mbps, I'd guess it'll actually do 20+mbps.
To function effectively. Depending on how many you can get on an access point it can work out cheaper. And compare with the cost of rolling out cat5 or fiber everywhere. Then there's the stuff you just can't do any other way. The big benefit of ubiquitous high bandwidth wifi though is that you can start to use it for all sorts of clever stuff.
e.g. Imagine taking one of those electronic paper book things out to the football field and showing the players a video of a play, with animated diagrams.
Then the engineers can take advantage of it too. Want a robogardener? Make the engineering departments big project to build a wireless PC into a powered lawn mower and the football field gets mowed twice a week.
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It seems made for an environment like this : a fixed network installation. It may not beat this in throughput, but it would seem to me to be way cheaper.
Isn't this "First College to Deploy 802.11n Network" instead?
I know it's early but c'mon.
I got the feeling from the article that this is the result of several properly aligning factors.
1. The school likes being known as a 'tech pioneer.'
2. The product needed a landmark event from an understanding, capable customer;
3. The price _must_ have been perfect;
4. The school was really ready for an upgrade and the timing was exactly right to make 802.11g obsolete upon order.
I do, my god it was slow. being older, and therefore obviously old fashioned, these high speeds still amaze me. Not that I wasn't impressed by 33k, the very fact that I could connect to another machine over the phone at all rocked.
Paradoxically though, while I am still in awe of such high speeds, I also whine when my 10mbit interwebs connection is taking too long to transfer the multi gigabyte result sets I have to chuck about between machines.
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Johnny, aged 17 noted 'everytime I go to collage I get a funny tingling in my brain like I'm being slowly microwaved to death.' Students have also been complaining about a blue glowing around anything electrical and a curious crackling noise in the background.
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A little background on SUNY Morrisville. I went there with New York Boy's State back in 2002. I never attended the school as a student so these are my impressions from staying there for a week. Morrisville is small, technical and farming college located in a really rural part central New York state. I believe that it was a 2-year college five years ago, but may now have a 4-year program. It is largely a farming college and boasts an award-winning dairy farm on campus. Ford also built an auto repair facility on campus, and I have known people go to Morrisville to learn auto mechanics. According to Wikipedia, there are about 3000 undergraduate students there and an extension campus in Norwich, NY. This makes it roughly the size of my old High School.
An enlightenment painter would paint a grand house on a lawn; A romantic painter would paint it on fire.
After supporting 8 years of various 802.11? implementations we got Meru's abg solution last year. It works differently than any other switching solution out there by having all AP's on same channel and look like one giant AP. The clients are totally out of the picture as to which AP they are talking to. It is the first solution that has just worked for us. Highly recommended.
Hoyty
Exactly. I've had one here since February. Apple has sold 100s of thousands of Airports with 802.11n and others have sold a ton more too.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Has anyone seen N cards hanging G access points?
I know this isn't ask slashdot or tech support but it's at least related to the subject. I have a new Macbook Pro with N wireless. Our local town has a small wireless LAN used for emergency services. In our last drill I brought my mbp with me but every time I fired up my wireless I would hang the Linksys WRT54G access point. I'm going to try and get them to flash their AP with newer Linksys firmware but they are reluctant to do this.
The first 802.11n network?
I have one in my house.
Some of the other commenters have mentioned that the school likes to be bleeding edge and its true. I went there for a two year stint from fall of 02 to spring of 04. They hit a lot of firsts. First school with a mandatory laptop program (you could not enroll in a CIS major without buying or providing a laptop.) First school with campus wide wireless. Yes you could get a signal on any part of school property (Even out in the equestrian program's barns.) The only trouble with the original wireless networks is that because they adopted so early, the existing network was 802.11a. As many of you may know, its getting harder and harder to find and support 802.11a hardware.
Additionally they removed all the copper Ethernet from the dorms so using the Internet from the dorms was horrible. There really was not enough bandwidth to go around, and lots of concrete and metal furniture didn't help either. This was also at the time when p2p was really taking off and the network had never been built to expect that kind of traffic. To further mess things up, they removed all the pots telephone lines from the dorms and issued every student a cell phone. They got into a deal with Nextel that put a tower on campus, and created their own mini-cell network. Seemed like a good idea until everyone discovered push-to-talk. There were more phone's chirping than birds. And if you think Cell phones in the movies are bad, cell phones in the classroom are worse.
So anyway while it may seem like they are blazing forward, this is really just a much needed upgrade from an earlier deployment. Most of the students wanted these kinds of upgrades while I was still there. Really all they needed was more access points in the dorms, but I understand that there are only so many can be crammed together before they run all over each other.
It may sound like a rant against the school, but I really enjoyed my time there, Mainly because I commuted from (sorta) nearby Syracuse.
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That school is plain awful. Anyone stuck there's gonna need a fast internet connection cause there is NOTHING else to do. This was just a 2-yr college up until a few years ago.
So how long until the place is closed down because of health fears about this evil radiation, then?
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Why are they deploying a draft specification on such a large scale? The article says that they're banking on the draft becoming final, or that it will be a relatively easy flash up to the full 802.11n spec once that's released. Is this realistic? Anybody in-the-know on 802.11n have insight into this?
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Holy CRAP! Someone out there knows that there is more to New York State than NYC, Long Island and "the rest of the state"! Amazing!
Police Man: Sir, would you please recite the 802.11 specifications backwards? Oh and what each ones primary goal is?
Inebriated Driver: Yeah, just give me a ticket.
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BTW what is the advantage over G? Still 2.4ghz?
It just starts over again with a second letter; 802.11aa, 802.11ab, 802.11ac..
It's really just a base-26 numbering system that can't use numbers since they're already used in the 802.11 part.
err, 900 APs seems to be a hell of a lot. I thought there were 2 major advantages
to 802.11n - more real data throughput and more coverage. givenm that...how big
is this college as I know of many colleges/universities that are fairly big
that have around that many 802.11a/b/g access points. and some that have even less.
i know that MERU used to like the idea of sticking one 802.11a AP into practically
every office...like Trapeze do...but with a real wireless survey and location mapping
plan that is an amount to paint a small town with...AND 802.11n isnt ratified. thats
a scary attitude to funding money.
I attend and work at DeVry University in Illinois and we deployed campus wide 802.11N AP's months ago.
I assume most of the devices used to access these APs will be wireless g devices. As such, won't the APs fall back to g compatibility mode, preventing you from getting either the range or the speed that wireless n offers? What's the point of having an n sender and a g receiver?