Everyone: As promised, here are my notes summarizing the discussions last week at the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference Wireless-LAN session. Thank you all for attending. If you didn't attend the conference, it really is a great opportunity to discuss your wireless networking successes, failures, questions, concerns and general experiences with peers from around the world.
This is the 2nd year I lead the discussion. As I'm moving in to the role of (co) CG Leader for the Network Management CG, I'm not sure I'll have the opportunity to lead this group again in the near future. I'd just like to thank Lee Badman and Michel Davidoff for the opportunity. I didn't take a head-count, but I believe we had ~60 people in attendance. 8a is a tough time slot for a group who tends to work better at night. Maybe we should recommend a midnight time slot for EDUCAUSE 2016 in Anaheim? Just a couple general observations first. In preparing for the session, I looked over the discussions in the Wireless-LAN list from the previous 12 months. AppleTV discussions have faded away (yay!). Cisco still dominates as a single vendor discussion (of the ~265 unique topics discussed over the last 12 months, Cisco-centric discussions accounted for 34. No other wireless vendor had more than 3). In general, the most discussed topic was 802.11ac deployments. On a more amusing topic, if you troll any of the numerous podcasts on technology, networking, enterprise computing, etc you'll have heard the opinion (I stress "opinion") that BYOD is dead. Let's see a show of hands .. how many of you are no longer supporting BYOD? Exactly. We covered A LOT of ground this session. This email will be far too long if I dive in to the topics, but I'll summarize each. Maybe these will spur other discussions on the listserv.. * Open vs Encrypted Wireless - generally related to Guest and ResNet networks. Overwhelmingly people are requiring some kind of authentication. * Funding - the perennial topic. One thing that is very clear, students not only want, but they EXPECT wireless. * Private LTE - In late-September, there was some jockeying by Cisco, Verizon and a couple other technology companies on this subject. If you're a larger school, it may be something to look at. The general opinion was that it didn't scale down, so cost for the masses wasn't going entice the smaller/mid-sized schools. * 80 or 20 HMz channels - Another throughput discussion. 802.11ac is still a minority deployment, but as it grows this discussion will become more frequent. * Guest WiFi - Another perennial topic. This discussion centered on how guests are "onboarded", specifically if people are using texting gateways or social media login credentials. An interesting question came up that could be a good topic of discussion for the list - Are there regulatory (e.g CALEA) issues with guest wireless? * Mixed wireless implementations - as we roll out 802.11ac, how are institutions managing mixed-technology wireless networks (the strongest recommendation was to upgrade whole buildings to have a homogenous network in the "region"). * How much bandwidth are institutions designing for the trunk lines to their radios/arrays? How many cables are you running to each? Are people looking at higher-capacity copper (ie Cat6A) or NBase-T (2.5Gbps Ethernet)? * Do people track the number of devices on your wireless networks, and what tools do you use to do this? - NAC or vendor-specific If I missed any topics, please feel free to add to the list. This is one of the more active groups (currently there are 1883 subscribers to the Wireless-LAN list!). An interesting bit of information, the Network Management (NetMan) CG has 1364 subscribers. You'd think there would be a great deal of cross-over between the groups.. but 500 is a big difference. Thank you all again for this opportunity. I look forward to future discussions here, and being an attendee in future Wireless-LAN sessions! -Brian ____________________________________ Brian Helman, M.Ed | Director, ITS/Networking Services | *: 978.542.7272 Salem State University, 352 Lafayette St., Salem Massachusetts 01970 GPS: 42.502129, -70.894779 ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
