Florida State commits to Wi-Fi deployment: four-year effort expands to campus classrooms

The proliferation of Wi-Fi hot spots at airports and coffee shops has whet users' appetites for more--and once college students and faculty experience the convenience of wireless bandwidth, it doesn't take long before they begin asking their information technology administrators to install it on campus, too.

Wi-Fi is becoming an important initiative for more and more colleges and universities. And for a large public university such as Florida State in Tallahassee, that undertaking can be similar in scale to that of a municipal deployment. Like other academic institutions implementing Wi-Fi, FSU has faced funding, security and manpower issues--and has found some creative solutions to all three challenges.

INITIAL EXPERMENT

IT personnel at FSU first began experimenting with Wi-Fi about four years ago as a means of connecting several outlying buildings to the campus computer network without having to lay fiber. That experience taught them that they would need to address potential security vulnerabilities before expanding further, says Clint Ringgold, FSU coordinator of computer system control. "We decided to go with a gateway approach to take care of security," Ringgold says.

A year of in-house testing followed. "We required people to log on to the campus network," says Ringgold. "That empowered us to be able to take known user information from the university and if there is a security issue, we can determine the individuals who might have been involved."

Manpower issues also were top of mind. "Part of our solution was that our network had to be able to be run by a very small number of people," Ringgold says. "We have three people in our wireless group taking care of approximately 3,000 total users, including 1,500 on a daily basis." Those numbers continue to climb and could swell to include all 40,000 faculty, staff and students as more and more computers come equipped with Wi-Fi cards.

Network administrators developed several computer screens that would be automatically sent to users when certain situations arose to help the users solve the situation on their own. If users have a virus problem or are consuming too much bandwidth, for example, a screen appears on their computer advising them of the problem.

Bandwidth and Network Manage

Bandwidth management also known as Network Management Bandwidth or Network Bandwidth Management is the technique to measure and control communications on network link that may result in congestion of network and inadequate performance.

Bandwidth management is frequently used synonym for data-transfer. Data-transferring rate is the rate at which a specific amount of data can be taken from a single point to the other during the specified time limit. This type of bandwidth usually is expressed in bps or bits per second. Very rarely, it is expressed in Bps (Bytes per second).

A modem, which operates at 57,600 bps is having double the bandwidth and rate of modem, which operates at 28,800 bps. A link having greater bandwidth is capable of carrying sufficient information for sustaining the progression of pictures in any video presentation.

An actual communication path normally comprises of a link succession with every link having its private bandwidth.

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