Monte Schmeiser wrote:
We have the unfortunate arrangement at our institution in which our dorms
are located off campus about 5 miles away. We are using a Navy Housing
property site for our student dorms. For the past few years we have been
directing students to a local cable company to provide them with internet
access. The cost of building a network at the housing site and the hardware
required to build a wireless network there has prevented us from moving
forward.
My question is, are there any institutions out there that have, instead of
installing a number of wireless access points, installed maybe one or two
high powered wireless antennas that connect directly to the internet. I
know there has got to be something out there so I am submitting this to the
group.
Thank you for any advice or direction you can give me.
Monte Schmeiser
Director of Institutional Technology
Marymount College
Rancho Palos Verdes, California
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
310-303-7684
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Monte,
The issues are coverage, capacity (bandwidth), and implicitly, frequency
reuse. Wireless coverage is analogous to illumination—the principles of
physics are the same. You can provide task lighting either with a number
of smaller, aptly located lamps, or one large bright bulb in the center
of the room. The argument for one bright bulb is that it’s simpler and
cheaper. The drawbacks are shadows (coverage holes) and the fact you get
only one AP’s worth of performance (theoretically 54 Mbps if 802.11g, 11
Mbps if 802.11b, etc).
Early on, cellular providers built out by erecting big, booming
omni-directional cell sites to serve their relatively few customers. As
their capacity requirements grew (and their spectrum remained finite)
they segmented the large cells both by sectorization and infill; the
effect of which was both richer coverage and the capacity to serve more
subscribers. The smaller cells reuse the radio channels of non-adjacent
cells. This is relevant in the WLAN space because spectrum is finite
here, too. One system’s signal is an adjacent system’s noise!
Perhaps this adds some insight.
Thanks,
Dave
David Beyerle, P.E.
Communications Engineer
Academic Services & Emerging Technologies
Penn State University
122J Computer Bldg.
University Park PA 16802-2100
[EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
814 863-9432
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discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
