Spurred by students’ voracious appetites for smartphones and broadband mobile devices, demand for wireless service and bandwidth-intensive mobile applications has grown dramatically at Texas A&M University. Faced with this challenge, the university had two alternatives: deploy new microcell sites for each operator, or deploy a shared network of Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS). Texas A&M’s solution provides a glimpse into the communications challenges that many universities face today.
A lengthy list of institutions has signed on for emergency notification services from Omnilert this summer, among them, Central Texas College in Killeen, TX; Hanover College in Indiana; Augsburg College in Minneapolis, MN; and Palo Alto University in California.
While the rest of the world will experience increases in education IT spending this year, in the United States, information technology will be flat through the end of 2010. But, according to research firm Gartner, growth will resume in 2011 and continue at least through 2014.
Each time a new building goes up at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, cell phone coverage is affected--and never for the better. To support the explosive growth of mobile devices on campus, the Information Services & Technology organization at MIT recently worked with several vendors to improve campus coverage for cell phone users.
An iPhone app conceived by two students at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, built as a computer science class project, and purchased by the school's IT organization has made its public debut in the Apple iTunes store.
In the race for Internet speed, the United States could definitely be called a slacker. According to data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, in the area of average advertised broadband download speed this country falls somewhere between those little heralded hotbeds of high tech, Italy and Greece.
When a phone company's name is on your university's facility, do you want calls made through its cellular service to be dropped inside that building? Avoiding that scenario may be part of the reasoning behind Texas Tech University's decision to deploy a new antenna system to support cellular service in its newly renovated Jones AT&T Stadium.
Videoconferencing has been promoted as a way for classes to meet during storms and pandemics. It has provided a way for students to get instruction from experts around the world. But at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis the technology has also helped sustain an academic degree that might otherwise not have survived.
Cisco Systems is the latest vendor to enter the tablet device market and, like other players, the company is looking at its entry as an alternative to traditional Windows-based PCs.
Oklahoma State University plans to run an Apple iPad project during the fall 2010 semester to research the use of the tablet device in a classroom setting.