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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.
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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.
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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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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.
The key point is the difference between bits and bytes. A 10Mbps connection is a 1.25MB/s connection.
1.25 megabytes. Remember that a generic S-ATA or IDE hard disk writes at about 5-6MB/s and that can be a big bottlencek most of the time. So the 54Mbps connection you speak of is a total speed of ~7MB/s. That's not the internet speed. That's the LAN connection. So one person tries to send a large file to another on the network and all of a sudden we've hit that bottleneck and no one can even check their email.
Although some of these numbers sound impressive realistically for daily LAN usage they are just about usable.
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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.
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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
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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You can't compare bit rates of telephone and ethernet connections directly. It takes 10 bits to transmit 1 byte over the telephone because each byte has a start bit and a stop bit, which is an overhead of 25%. Over the network, everything is transmitted in 1500-byte packets with a 14-byte header and 4-byte footer; so the overhead per byte is much less at 1.2%.
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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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No, you don't, and neither does anyone else. You have Draft-N (possibly Draft 2.0), which is different. The official N specification hasn't been released yet, and isn't expected to be standardized/finalized until around September of 2008 (see orange-highlighted column). It's entirely feasible that existing Draft-N products are N-compatible once the spec is final (and many advertise to this effect), but I wouldn't bank on that.
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Ehm... no.... that should be "First College to Deploy DRAFT 802.11n Network"
. 11_Timelines.htm
802.11n hasn't been ratified yet, there's no such thing as an 802.11n network at the moment.
Currently expected in september 2008
http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/802/11/Reports/802
It will be a while before someone rolls out the first 802.11n network.
TTB
Nope, hard disk speeds are quoted in MB/sec, not Mbps. You're a factor of 8 out - 40-50MB/sec is more like it (and modern desktop drives are a bit faster than that).
You've never actually used a network somebody else is using, have you? Suggesting that when one user saturates the network nobody else can even check their email is quite simply wrong. Every shared networking technology in use today shares the bandwidth out pretty fairly and with modest overhead for a reasonable number of clients. You can reach a stage where there are so many clients simultaneously using bandwidth that overall throughput suffers, but it takes a damn sight more than one person sending one file to do it. I saturate my 54Mbps Wi-Fi connection every time I back up my laptop and not only can everybody else on the network (often me using another machine) check their email, they can stream hi-def content from the interwebs, send huge files and do pretty much anything else they'd normally do too. With at most half a dozen or so clients on my AP I've never seen overall throughput drop, the bandwidth just gets shared out fairly between the clients. If two try to send big files, of course they only get half the bandwidth each, but it still works just fine. With 100 clients doing P2P it would be a different matter.
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You're mixing up your layers there.
The modem's encoding a byte with 10 bits would be at layer 1.
Over that, you'd have Ethernet, with its own overhead (the 14+4 bytes you mentioned), PPP, etc, at layer 2.
Over that, you have IP, with a 20 byte header, layer 3
And over that, you have TCP, with a 32 byte header, layer 4.
Not to mention that those 1500 byte packets are only 1500 bytes when transferring large amounts of data. Something with small packets like SSH gets more overhead.