January 1997 — Exclusive

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The Connected Schools of Belen, New Mexico: A Wireless Success Story

But also typical of such schools, there were only a few early adopters of telecommunications. A once-math, science, and computer teacher at the Belen High School, Greg Anderson (greg@belen.k12.nm.us), took the full time position of Technology Specialist for the district. Later he recruited one of his former students - Robert Franklin (wob@belen.k12.nm.us), who was now in an undergraduate degree program in computer science at the University of New Mexico, to assist him. These two comprise the total technical staff of the district.

The Economics of Wireless

Of the available $400,000, a sum of $300,000 was allocated to network all the schools, none of which had a LAN, and integrate them into the administrative services computers of the district. Firewalls isolated the administrative computers from the educational computers. There were two school libraries and resources on LAN servers needed throughout the district.

While the district wanted to connect its spread-out schools to each other and the Internet, they did not think it was economically feasible. A happenstance contact with a local resident familiar with spread spectrum radios (a Sandia Test Labs worker) informed them that they could use commercial versions of such radios to link their schools. So they put out an RFP specifying the connectivity they aspired to: linking all schools with each other, and to one school that would be the hub, and through it to the Internet through TechNet in Albuquerque. It was a bold move, and had the support of the school board, even though this was a technology little known in the area.

Belen received bids of $800,000 that included a microwave wireless solution, $550,000 for a hybrid wired solution, and $300,000 from an Albuquerque firm, Tamsco, which offered a no-license wireless solution.

Tamsco's quote used the Solectek AIRLAN/Bridge Plus, which was rated at 1.544 Mbps, or T1 wireless operating in the 915MHz range. Costs were $5,900 per radio, $1,200 for antenna, and $5,600 for the siting, erection and installation of the antenna towers and cabling. The high school was made the hub.

Ultimate cost, installed, was roughly $12,000 per school to get the radio network up and operating at T1 speeds to and between all 8 schools and the district headquarters.

Before installation was complete, Solectek included their newer radios that operate in the 2.4GHz no- license range, at the same price. This, of course, required separate antennas at the hub, since the radios do not interoperate. All radios were installed only as bridges (not packaged with routers). In the end, five 2.4GHz and four 915MHz radio systems were installed, linking all the schools, and forming the backbone of the network.

Separately, three 3Com routers and a Cisco router were installed to route the TCP/IP packet traffic between sites, and to provide firewalls between the educational and administrative computers. 10Base-T Ethernet wiring was used throughout, supplemented by fiber links within some schools. Belen purchased 120 IBM-compatible 486s, running Windows for Workgroups, and installed them in the schools, linking them to the LANs and wireless nets through a combination of Novell NetWare 3.1, Windows NT 3.51, and Linux UNIX systems as LAN servers. The UNIX system provided TCP/IP name server and other network services at the hub site. This included centralized monitoring, and filtered if needed, access to the World Wide Web or any Internet site from any school computer.