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.

Concentrate on Building Residual Income

Residual income programs are the best way to make long-term income. For example, even if you overspent a little for a forty dollar sale using pay-per-click ads. Let us say you are in the red by seven dollars. If that program offered renewal payments for a service like web hosting. You would be profitable on the second payment, and all future payments would be icing on the cake.

Imagine if you got recurring bonuses at your regular job for sales you made months or years ago. That would be a great job. Well, that job is yours for the taking. All you need is a website theme. You do not need to build a website that you know very little about.

Everyone has a passion or a hobby; they know more than the average person about their area of interest does. It really is of little consequence what your passion or hobby might be (up to a point). If you are interested in fishing, boating, skiing, sports, home improvement, flowers, gardens, decorating, cars, juggling balls, saving money, travel destinations or whatever. You can turn your passions into multiple streams of income.

There are tens of thousands affiliate programs that you can promote. Many of these programs offer lifetime commissions. My favorites are usually some kind of service. Creating websites that generate multiple streams of income is easier that I ever thought possible. Search engines love to find real information about every subject. That is what search engines do. They find the most in depth and most relevant results for any search inquiry.

The most successful websites are those that provide solutions. When people look for information, they are really looking for a solution. From catching, more fish to growing a bigger pumpkin. If you can provide the answer that searchers are looking for, you can turn your area of interest into income. Even if, all you do is provide free information.

Once you have decided on a niche that you know well, it is worth the time and effort to find out if you can profit from your niche. There are online resources that we can use to determine supply and demand for a niche. There are also resources that help evaluate the competition, as well as tools that help determine the profitability of a niche. After you have found that you have a solid idea, you can start building your own website. A home based business that you can do in your spare time.

In conclusion, spend your time promoting programs that offer lifetime commissions. You will come out much further ahead in the end, than you would by offering one-time sales. Of course, you could do both, just realize that your efforts can be rewarded long term.