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Technology Implementation >> The Power of TWO
5/27/2005
Making Wireless Happen
Schools are partnering with technology resellers and integrators to succeed with their implementations, too. At Hiwassee College (TN), for instance, a five-year, $1 million grant from the US Department of Education served as the impetus for officials to partner with education technology and services provider CDW-G (www.cdwg.com). Mark Moore, activities director and academic network administrator at the college, says that the school had been contemplating a wireless network for years before submitting its grant application in early 2003. When the federal funding came through that November, Hiwassee went through a lengthy RFP process and chose CDW-G as integrator, largely because of the vendor’s commitment to work with the school to put a plan into action.
The plan began with three or four conference calls, during which representatives from the CDW-G technology team questioned Hiwassee officials about precisely what they wanted. What were their expectations? What were their concerns? How did they want the technology to impact campus life? What was their budget? CDW-G listened as Hiwassee technologists responded in turn. When all was said and done, the solution provider had a solid sense of what technology would work best, and how the CDW-G team might go about implementing it. When asked about this preliminary process, Moore remembers that the barrage of questions was actually reassuring.
“It was more than just a questionnaire,” says Moore, looking back. “The way those initial discussions went, CDW-G gave us the sense that they really were interested in building a solution that was unique to Hiwassee.”
The solution, which ultimately revolved around products from wireless vendor Proxim Wireless Networks (www.proxim.com), was not without its challenges. For buildings on campus with fiber-optic Ethernet connections, the implementation was straightforward. For those structures without hardwired Internet, however, CDW-G had to rely on strong wireless antennas to broadcast the signal into hard-to-reach areas. In the end, CDW-G farmed out some of the actual installation work to a handful of local solution providers. Still, Moore says that because the integrator involved these resellers from the very beginning, there were no surprises as the job unfolded, and the trio of implementation teams was able to strategize the deployment of 56 Proxim Orinoco access points in all.
The University of Illinois/SCT deal was unusual: U of I would contribute code for its open source gateway, SCT would blend it and code of their own in a proprietary solution, and the school would get a royalty the first 10 times SCT sold the gateway to other clients.
To say the $100,000 implementation went well would be an understatement. Today, Moore says that wireless coverage on the school’s Madisonville, TN campus is actually broader and more reliable than local cellular coverage.
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