February 2008 — News
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The 2 Mistakes Schools Make in Deploying Wireless Networks
When the School District of Philadelphia announced last fall that it was deploying wireless Internet access at every school in the district--some 268 campuses--it was hyped as one of the world's largest enterprise wireless local area networks. Aside from the scale of the project (which involves the equivalent of 14,000 access points), the news barely raised an eyebrow among K-12 administrators. After all, announcements of new school deployments of WiFi have practically become a monthly occurrence on THEJournal.com.
Yet, according to wireless expert Frank Keeney, many schools and districts go into their deployments making two mistakes:
- They underestimate what equipment will be needed for full campus coverage; and
- They don't give enough thought to security concerns.
As president of Pasadena Networks, Keeney has consulted on and deployed his share of wireless deployments in campus environments. Now he sells wireless LAN equipment all over the world. In this interview, he shares his insights on how to overcome the two biggest mistakes schools make regarding WiFi.
Dian Schaffhauser: So how would a school district or a school go about getting a sense of the equipment they're going to need?
Frank Keeney: Ideally, it's part of a site survey with a vendor that will bring out some equipment and do some testing... Many of the manufacturers are very optimistic in their projections on their coverage, so they typically take ideal situations. You just can't set up an access point at the top of a building then expect everybody's laptop at every building indoors and out to be able to access that.
Schaffhauser: Are there any ways that a school can test coverage without having access to a lot of baseline information or a lot of equipment?
Keeney: Sure. Typically the best thing to do is, they can start out with one location and get a feel for what it's actually going to cover...
It's not just an issue of getting an access point [and testing that] but getting several different types of antennas to actually do the testing and find out which antennas work the best for that particular environment. When I would go out and do testing in the past, I would typically [take] three antennas and show the client, 'Here's the kind of coverage you're going to get.' Just try the antennas to see what works the best. There are some antennas that send the signal in all directions. But if you put an access point up in a corner of a room or a building, then you only need to send and receive the signal in one direction. You can use something directional. Those typically work a lot better. In almost every circumstance, a directional antenna will outperform what a directional antenna will do.
