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."

Comments

Re:Pioneers? Sure, but....

[Anonymous Coward]

I grew up in Morrisville, NY. It's a 2000 people, 5000 cow town who's population doubles when college is in session.

SUNY Morrisville did have one of the first wireless campuses in the state. They also gave out free (although horribly admin-locked) laptops to students. I think that their small size may help them in adopting the latest technologies. Plus they do try to shake the image they have of being an equestrian college in a farm town.

I never went to SUNY Morrisville myself, but had a couple friends from high school that did.

Meru just works

[hoyty]

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.

About Freaking Time

[vtechpilot]

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.

Re:About Freaking Time

[kobaz]

I too went to SUNY Morrisville. I was there from 01-03 as a Computer Science major. If you think you guys had it bad for bandwidth. You should have seen the status in 01. Anyone who got a laptop as part of the required laptop program had to go to that orientation. At the orientation I ethernetted in and I was all happy to test out the blazing fast campus internet. It had to be better than cable at home... right? I busily downloaded firefox and some other tools using console ftp (ftp in ie was broken on the campus standard laptop windows install). The orientation instructor walked by and immediately asked "hey, what are you trying to find out over there". I'm like uhh, I'm just downloading some stuff. I was getting around 100k/sec. Not terrible, but not what I expected. As the lecture went on my download speed dropped. At the end I was getting about 10k/sec... wtf?

I figured this was a fluke and I was all excited to try out this new fangled wireless since I had never used a wireless network before. I plug in my 1mbit raylink 802.11a wireless card and dI boot up and go to google. Timeout while resolving host... hmm, that's odd... reload. Timeout again. Repeat 10 times. Oh there it is finnaly. I do a quick search for my favorite mozilla plugins. Waiting for remote host... timeout... wtf? The results page finnaly starts loading at 200 bytes a second. This was the residential internet for 6 months. The academic network was a bit better, during the day at class I could actually get my email and do a google search or two. I later found out that the residential got it's very own t1 (for 3500 students). The academic network was also on a lonely t1. Many people in my building bought dialup accounts just so they can get their email.

Second semester I got a sysadmin position for the computer science department. That was quite nice since now I can use the academic network from my room (especially after class and get a full t1).

At the end of the first semester they got one more t1 for resnet and one more t1 for the academic network. Now I was able to get about 5-10k/sec on a good day on resnet. Second semester I moved off campus to what they called the honors house (which was kinda like a low key frat house). We had ethernet! And by this time the school got 8 more t1's for resnet and 8 more for the academic network. I kept my tunnel to the servers I was admining and would get a whopping 600k/sec during off peak hours. By the end of my second year they put in qos so that no one could chew up the entire pipe, and by now I have a feeling they finally have adequate bandwidth and qos for everyone.