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."

54mbps?

[mastershake_phd]

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.

Re:54mbps?

[niceone]

54mbps isn't fast enough?

Shared between whoever's within range of a particular access point in a school, 54Mb/s doesn't seem all that much.

Not necessarily...

[The Master Control P]

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.

Greater throughput allows more clients

[Colin Smith]

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.

 

I doubt this is the first 802.11network...

[Marton]

Isn't this "First College to Deploy 802.11n Network" instead?

I know it's early but c'mon.

Pioneers? Sure, but....

[ezratrumpet]

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.

802.11n draft for live?

[Cerberus7]

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?