UO Prepares for Increasing Wireless Use on Campus

With the growth of wireless networks, there's no need to stay tethered to a network jack

Greg Bothun
Professor, Department of Physics
nuts@bigmoo.uoregon.edu

Networking is rapidly moving towards wireless communication. Indeed, all of technological society is moving to an "on-demand" and location- independent mode of information access, with high throughput.

In principle, if you have the proper wireless network appliance, you should be able to be anywhere on the planet that has wireless connectivity and access your favorite site on the Internet.

Students work on an assignment in the wireless classroom in 204 Condon.

Here at the UO, we recognized early on that wireless would become an increasingly important component of our basic network infrastructure. Since the year 2000, Network Services, largely funded by student Ed Tech dollars, has worked aggressively to build out wireless access throughout the campus community, including many outdoor spaces.

These days, increasing numbers of students can be observed accessing the wireless network from various locations on campus. Indeed there are even whole classrooms in which the use of wireless laptops by students is an integral part of the course. Those particular classrooms (Condon 204 and Library 41/42) provide students with wireless laptops, but students can use their own wireless laptops there as well.

Students purchasing new laptops should most definitely be searching for those that have "integrated wireless" capability. In geek-speak, that means the laptop is 802.11b, 802.11a, and/or 802.11g compliant.

At the UO, our main wireless standard is 802.11b, but in early 2004 we will be installing 802.11g equipment; the data rate for g is about five times that of b.

Students contemplating wireless options should be aware that many versions of the Palm Pilot or the Pocket PC are now wireless compliant. This means you won’t necessarily need a laptop to access UO wireless and the global Internet.

Although the display on these hand-held devices is generally limited to 320x240 pixels, it still allows you to access some useful information.

For example, the UO has recently invested in a new video-on-demand (VOD) technology that, among other things, can offer students indexed video replays of class lectures. So it’s possible that some day in the future, if you wanted to review the two minutes of the lecture in which the prof said "this is going to be on the midterm," you could conceivably have the streaming video and audio delivered to you most anywhere on campus via your PDA.

Wireless access to the campus network and the global Internet has many potential benefits to the campus community. Information can now flow more easily from place to place and you can access it without being tethered to a network jack. Indeed, in the wireless world, students would always be "jacked in."

Network Services will continue to increase the coverage and efficiency of wireless networking on the UO campus. In turn, students should start to pay attention to this new service and the kinds of wireless network appliances that are available.

Resources

More information on campus wireless, including set-up instructions, is available on the Microcomputer Services information page at http://micro.uoregon.edu/wireless/

For a discussion of home network configurations, including wireless components and standards, you may want to visit Microcomputer Services "Home Networking" page at
http://micro.uoregon.edu/homenetworking/