Tulane University launches $1.7 million LAN

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By James Cope

(IDG) -- When students at Tulane University in New Orleans return to classes, IT managers at the university hope they will have at least part of a new wireless LAN up and running. The LAN will ultimately employ up to 1,000 wireless access points from Rochester, N.H.-based Enterasys Networks Inc.

Tulane announced it had allocated $1.7 million for the wireless LAN project and said that 800 Enterasys RoamAbout R2 units were on the way.

The university's vice president of technology, Jed Diem, said he and the director of network services, Tim Deeves, selected the Enterasys RoamAbout R2 access point equipment over two other companies because of the ease of migration.

The university will switch from the current 802.11b industry standard, which runs at 11M bit/sec., to the faster 802.11a standard, which will send data through the air at up to 54M bit/sec. Diem said the Enterasys wireless access point chassis has a dual-slot design. One slot accommodates today's 11b radio card, while the other awaits an 11a card that Enterasys said it will ship by year's end.

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The Layer 3 capabilities of the Enterasys product also played a part in the vendor selection, Diem said. The additional functionality, he noted, will allow Tulane to create wireless subnets dedicated to specific categories of traffic that only a given department or set of individuals will be allowed to access.

"If all access points were operating at Layer 2, there could be broadcast traffic that might be seen by others [who should not see it]," Deeves said.

Another Approach

While Enterasys is convinced that dual slots provide a logical migration path from 802.11b to 802.11a, other vendors aren't.

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Proxim Inc., for example, has elected to place routing and management control for its Harmony wireless LAN series into a separate unit called the Harmony Access Point Controller and has also developed separate 802.11b and 802.11a radio housings instead of putting both in the same chassis.

Galen Schreck, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., said it's too early to say whether one migration approach will be superior to another. A more important issue for IT managers, Schreck noted, is whether a wireless network is warranted at all.

"A university campus makes sense for wireless LANs," said Schreck, "because people are roaming all over the place." But in a company where you have network jacks in conference rooms and other common areas, wireless may be unnecessary, he noted.

According to Diem, the 802.11b radio cards running at 11M bit/sec. will be adequate for student and classroom access to the campus network. But he added that there are applications, such as a foreign-language multimedia application, that are begging for the faster speeds of 802.11a.