All,
42 people showed up at the roundtable discussion on WLAN at Educause
on November 4th, in Denver CO.
The room could hold a maximum of 50 so we didn't do too bad!
(results of the survey are at the end of the email)
The following questions were addressed:
# Is the audience interested to have very short surveys on the list on
a topic of interest?
(makes it easier on people in the list that do not want to respond to
the whole world)
Almost all of the audience was in favor.
# Are you struggling with IPs for smartphones on Wi-Fi?
Many concerns on this topic and no real solution
-NAT can help but logging is a pain
-Throw more IPs, but where does it end
-Shorter lease (as short as 15 minutes) helps as well
but only to a certain extend
-One vendor is proposing to send a "release" message
to DHCP server when a host leaves the infrastructure
(more effective than DHCP half-time?)
-This one was not discussed but I'm throwing it:
Could smartphones on Wi-Fi be the tipping point for IPv6 adoption?
#Wired connections in Dorms
- Usage of wired ports is going down every year
- Wireless only is a concerned because of IPTV
some campuses are successful with IPTV over 802.11n
when enabling multicast
- One campus is planning to turn Wired off and enable on student request
#NAC
-Quite a few people in the audience where moving away from NAC
(unpleased with current solutions, too many problems compared
to benefits)
-One person very satisfied with a not well known solution
-One person very satisfied with a well known solution
-A fairly large consensus on making the network itself more robust
(using switches, Routers, APs, and controllers) to prevent common
attacks
eg: prevent traffic between users on wireless (no Windows share)
#Road blocks with 802.11n implementation
-n will cover a little more than b/g but if your current WLAN is not
dense enough
do not count solely on 802.11n to fix dead zones. More cable drops
will be necessary.
-n definitely addresses some of the capacity concerns in auditoriums
-TKIP is not supported in n mode, only AES
We also covered lightly: Rogue detection and Frequency interferences,
Management software for WLAN,
IP mobility, Vendors of Choice, and Large Auditorium (this one was
referred to Archives
of the list)
Here are the results of the online Survey:
1 - 37 institutions responded to the survey
2 - What type of 802.11 available in dorms:
(in % of response)
b: 73%, g: 81%, a: 57%, n: 35%
3 - What type of 802.11 available on main campus:
(in % of response)
b: 90%, g: 95%, a: 71%, n: 55%
4- Help Desk challenged by WLAN
yes: 45% no: 55%
5 - Secure Access:
WPA: 29%, WPA2: 55%, 802.11i: 8%,
VPN: 26%, will have 1x: 5%, other: 34%
(other includes NONE! ... I'm still learning how to do survey!)
6 - Visitor Access:
Web Portal per person: 42%
Web Portal per group: 21%
Email registration: 16%
eduroam: 10%
none: 3%
other 40%
(again, learning surveys... other includes Physical Registration
and what else?)
Regards,
Philippe Hanset
University of Tennessee
**********
Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group
discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
