March 2005 — Applications

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Ethernet Technology Helps Unwire Utah Campus

By Robert Wineriter, University of Utah

The University of Utah in Salt Lake City takes pride in its state-of-the-art information technology system, which attracts new students and faculty every year. Today, the university supports a high-speed, highly secure network with access to the Internet, an e-mail system and a wealth of educational resources including Pioneer, Utah’s Online Library (http://pioneer-library.org).

The next step for the university, which has nearly 30,000 students enrolled, was to deploy a wireless network for our students and faculty who wanted access to the Internet, e-mail and online resources regardless of their location on campus. In addition to enhancing its connectivity, the university chose to deploy a wireless local area network (WLAN) to foster a fun and productive learning environment.

The Great Wireless Challenge: Money

Currently, more than a dozen of the university’s departments are installing wireless technologies. Because it is such a huge campus and the project is decentralized, each department performs installations according to its own needs and budgets. However, in an attempt to bring order out of chaos, the university has organized a wireless committee that meets regularly to discuss the successes and failures of the wireless community.

As a computer professional at the university, I serve on the wireless committee. I have led the university’s many projects to deploy a wireless network that could better serve the more than 43,000 combined faculty, staff and students. To complicate matters, our wireless committee was tasked to cost-effectively deploy wireless networks across the campus with a limited budget.

First, we decided to purchase Foundry Networks IronPoint wireless access points because they were reasonably priced. However, wireless access points must be installed in specific locations for proper operation. And considering the number of access points we had to deploy, wiring each one for electrical power, along with the Ethernet cabling, would have been a timely and expensive task.

In order to achieve effective area coverage and radio reception, wireless access points are often mounted in hard-to-reach places such as high ceilings, where it is rare to find an available AC outlet to power the units. The cost of hiring electricians to wire power outlets around campus proved to be a major problem, mainly because the installation costs were beginning to outweigh the obvious benefits of wireless connectivity.

An Empowering Solution

Members of the wireless committee investigated alternatives to supplying electrical power to the 200 access points from Foundry Networks and soon discovered that we could pull the existing Ethernet cabling to power them. This saved the university both time and money in the wireless network’s deployment. Initially, we tested the equipment by purchasing a six-port and 12-port Power over Ethernet (P'E) Midspan from PowerDsine (www.powerdsine.com). Soon thereafter, we received a PowerDsine Education Grant, and the extra P'E devices allowed us to pursue our WLAN deployment more aggressively.