I have always viewed WLANs as a complimentary technology to LANs and not a replacement. You'll always be an order of magnitude or two away in performance and you'll hard pressed to shape the characteristics of a shared medium (on a per port or per user basis) like you can a switched medium.
The convergence of voice, video, and data will lead us to unforeseen applications of technology that WLANs will be ill equipped to handle (who heard of p2p 4-5 years ago?) In fact, given the fact that the cable plant will long outlive the electronics, I would keep my horizontal runs on the conservative side so they can easily adapt to GigE 3-4 generations out. If you look at it on a practical level, to go back and rewire a dorm after the fact is far more expensive to wire it during the building process. To WiFi's defense, I can't imagine building a dorm WITHOUT it either. It's an expected base-line service on campus and more and more devices will have WiFi imbedded. -d -----Original Message----- From: 802.11 wireless issues listserv [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Daniel Eklund Sent: Tuesday, November 04, 2003 3:55 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [WIRELESS-LAN] Dorms My university has started building dorms (to this point we've been mostly commuter). While we've wired every room and given switched 100Mbps to the pillow, there is some question as to whether we should be providing wireless as well or instead of wired. Personally, I think switched 100M is preferable, but I'm not a student. I'm well aware of the problems associated with with wireless deployment, but have no feeling for how well other wireless dorm implementations have gone. What kind of experience do you have? -- Daniel Eklund Director, Network Engineering Wayne State University 313.577.5558 office 313.577.5577 fax 313.468.2070 cell ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/cg/. ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/cg/.
