Wireless at the Coalface: Part 2

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In the first part of this feature series we talked to two IT managers from the business world about the challenges they face in implementing wireless and mobile technology.

We asked about the benefits that current products are delivering for them, the limitations of today's technology, and about their hopes for how standards might evolve to better meet their needs in the future.

This month we pose the same questions to two senior IT professionals in the public sector.

Robert Cox, mobile computing services manager with Portsmouth University

The University of Portsmouth has grown rapidly, with applications for student places up by 70 per cent over the last four years.

It has a base of approximately 18,000 undergraduates, which it needs to provide with convenient and easy-to-access IT infrastructure. It decided back in 2001 that the 1,500 wired PCs it was making available for students to use in a few fixed areas were not meeting these needs on their own.

"With more and more courses having an electronic element, we needed to do better," says Cox. "We decided to give students mobile, real-time access to the university's network by attaching their own laptops to a wireless LAN."

He says the plan was a wireless LAN that would allow access from seminar rooms, lecture theatres, student unions and other areas across the campus, all at a low cost.

Cox says a period of evaluation ended with him speaking to Symbol Technologies about 802.11b, which was in its infancy at the time. "We based a pilot around a couple of access points they supplied us with," he says. "It was a three month trial that never ended."

What has changed since the initial pilot, he says, is dependence on a traditional wireless infrastructure where the intelligence of the system is housed in the access points.

"This resulted in a management challenge and unnecessary security threats," he told IT PRO. "The university required a system that could be easily administered, was secure and could be easily relocated. We went for a Symbol wireless switching solution, quite new at the time, because it promised to not only lower the costs of deploying network infrastructure but also help in driving down the cost of managing, maintaining and upgrading a wireless network."

The first wireless switches and access ports were installed on the university network in December 2002, providing students with speeds of 11 Mb/sec. Upgrades to these now provide access speeds up to 54 Mb/sec.

The network is controlled by five primary wireless switches and is backed by an additional five wireless switches for redundancy purposes. The University has set up approximately 100 wireless hot spots across its campuses.

"Fat access points are hard to manage," says Cox. "We wanted something more central. We were one of the first sites in the UK to use wireless switching - quite a radical gamble really. We still have a base of desktop PCs, but most students use their own Wi-Fi-enabled laptops.

Cox says he's keeping a close eye on developments like WiMax. "The problem we have is that we have students from all over the world, which works well for Wi-Fi as that's common pretty much everywhere," he says. "WiMax is a harder nut to crack. Maybe when Mobile WiMax happens, if it happens, that'll be the time to change. You should be able to put Mobile WiMax on buildings and get plenty of coverage, as it's not 'line of sight'."

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