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Features
Wireless Takes American Campuses by Storm
1/2/2007
The impact on campus life at Emory was almost immediate, with a remarkable surge in the uptake of wireless use at the university. Simultaneous connections during peak time have more than doubled from 800 in May 2006 to 1,830 as of October, mostly due to student demand.
The university has since replaced the legacy APs in the main library, student center, and other key areas, such as health sciences. The law school is the university's predominant user of wireless as it has a large online research component, and it is estimated that 97 percent of Emory law students now have laptops. Due to the demand for wireless, the university now stipulates that any new or remodeled building space must have that capability.
"It was really eye-opening to see the impact of the wireless network; I didn't expect this truly massive demand for wireless from the students," says Stan Brooks, RF engineer, Network Communications Group at Emory. "Nowadays, wireless is not an optional extra—students demand and expect it. If you're not offering wireless, you'll fall behind, as students don't want to be tethered [to desktops]."
Brooks has overseen Emory's wireless transformation with the completion of the first phase of its Aruba Networks wireless LAN (WLAN) rollout, with 1,370 Access Points (APs) and 20 mobility controllers deployed across the university's buildings, residential houses, and hospitals. By the end of 2006, Emory plans to implement Voice over WLAN (VoWLAN) in several areas of the network. When the deployment is complete, the Aruba network will provide wireless access to 11,300 students and 2,500 faculty members across the university, including the graduate school of arts and sciences; professional schools of medicine, theology, law, nursing, and public health; and Oxford College.
Prior to selecting Aruba, Emory relied on a legacy environment of 100 "fat" APs, which its IT staff found difficult to manage effectively. Emory officials began looking for a centralized WLAN system that provided better management. The university now boasts 1,370 Aruba AP-60 and AP-61 access points, distributed across two separate networks: 890 for academic use, and 480 APs throughout four hospitals. Ideal for dense AP deployments, the Aruba AP-60 and AP-61 access points are dual-function, single-radio 802.11a or b/g access points designed for use only with Aruba mobility controllers. Each AP provides dedicated or shared air monitoring, giving administrators a full view of and control over the 2.4 and 5 GHz RF spectrums, and eliminating the need for a discrete network of RF sensors.
In the previous AP environment, Emory had five engineers manually configuring APs for deployment. With the Aruba solution, the university is able to centrally manage and monitor all of these APs from the same console, using the same tools. Only one part-time technician is now needed to configure all of the Aruba APs. Management of the wireless is also much easier with just two staff members designing, deploying, and managing the entire WLAN.
