Students returning to campus for the new semester will find a world-class campus-wide wireless (Wi-Fi) network. The new high-speed, high-performance Wi-Fi network will provide mobile broadband access to students, faculty and staff throughout most of the buildings and grounds of the campus.
Our goal is to enable and support the broad range of video, voice, data and Internet applications that our students, faculty and staff want access to wherever they are on campus. The new wireless network will even support new generation Wi-Fi enabled devices, such as Apple’s new iPhone.
Virtually every building and outside space on the campus-side of Main street is covered, baseball and soccer fields included. The exceptions are Elm, Oak, Phi, and Eu and some buildings across Main street and Concord avenue. Our intention however is to extend wireless to these buildings in a separate project using a different strategy.
This project began with our usual consultative conversations with campus technology advisory committees. A study and comprehensive site survey was completed last autumn. Work deploying the network commenced in early summer 2007 and was completed in early August 2007 with thirty-two wireless transmitters mounted unobtrusively throughout the core campus.
This initiative puts Davidson in some very rare company, if not in a category of its own. A September 2005 survey conducted by the Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges (CLAC), an organization of the top liberal arts colleges, found that only a few institutions had plans to deploy campus-wide wireless access. Our new wireless network has the same state-of-the-art broadband wireless technology used in the citywide networks in Minneapolis, London, and Toronto.
By comparison, many colleges have settled for Wi-Fi architecture requiring multiple access points on each floor of each building to provide indoor coverage and outdoor coverage limited to non-contiguous hotspots. Davidson students, faculty, staff will benefit from ubiquitous coverage, increased capacity and a broader range of services enabled on the wireless network.
This decision is both financially and technically sound. We’ve reduced the capital and operational costs associated with our old building-by-building wireless access point deployments. In addition to supporting teaching and learning, the new wireless will be used in the future to support a variety of administrative functions including monitoring equipment, controlling lighting systems and retrieving and filing work orders from virtually anywhere on campus.
