Hanover, N.H.-based Dartmouth College is well-known in wireless circles for being one of the first colleges to embrace Wi-Fi technology. Recently, the college went through a network upgrade.
The original network, says Brad Noblet, Dartmouth director of technical services, cost $1.2 million. That covered 200 access points (APs) and the wiring they required. “Now we want to go to 1,500 APs.”
But that’s not all. The original Cisco APs were 802.11b only, and now the college wants to serve 802.11a, b, and g, using Aruba 52 APs.
Of course, the college doesn’t sell wireless, so that’s not the problem. “People on the campus love wireless. The challenge is capacity,” explains Noblet.
These are heavy users. Students do language lab classes from their own room using video over IP, for example, and Noblet admits that heavy use of video on the network presents a real capacity challenge.