Last fall, MSU finished wiring students on campus to Ethernet. This spring, students at Western Michigan University went wire-free.
Phase one of the Wireless Western project was completed last week, giving the university’s core campus in Kalamazoo Internet access from anywhere.
The new system will serve as a supplement to the standard Internet cable connection in most buildings about Western’s campus. Six hundred access points, or antennas for students with wireless capability, are scattered around the campus. Eventually, Western officials plan on providing wireless access to branches of the school around the state.
“The intention is to provide access at anytime, any place for students, staff and faculty,” said Viji Murali, vice president of information technology at Western. “By making the campus wireless, it allows those students who don’t have Internet access to have access if they have a laptop or a (personal digital assistant).”
With the wireless access, students can use their portable computers to access the Web, check e-mail and perform other basic tasks.
“They can chat with their professors, and even order pizza and football tickets online,” Murali said. “There are a lot of wonderful things that can enhance students’ lives on campus.”
Eric Chubb, a Western graduate student, is looking forward to installing the technology in his own machine. His building is not completely wired for broadband access, so the wireless technology would be a great help to him, he said.
“I teach, so I can have (the Internet) in my classroom that way,” he said.
At a cost of about $1.5 million, Western officials say it is still less expensive than if they were to use cable-based connections. A completely wired building, according to their estimates, would cost about five times as much as the new wireless configuration.
But the actual construction of a wireless network was the biggest roadblock.
“It was a real tall order,” said George Kohrman, project coordinator at Western.
It took Kohrman’s team two months to engineer locations for the 600 antennas that make up the project. He estimates that it would be infinitely more difficult on a campus of MSU’s size.
“It’s different here than it would be there,” he said. “Here, I can walk across campus in 15 minutes. There, it takes me 45 minutes to walk from one end to the other.”
A similar program at MSU would likely bring students more mobility and convenience than they have now.
MSU officials spent about $9 million to wire each of the university’s residence halls by 2001.
At MSU, there are experimental wireless access points in the Physics-Astronomy Building, Physical Plant and plans to place one on top of the Union, which would affect some areas of East Lansing north of Grand River Avenue.
But MSU officials say there are no plans to create a campuswide network.
“A basic opinion is that for our role, the connection standard is too slow and too crowded,” said Lewis Greenberg, director of MSU’s Computer Center.
Too many people would be trying to access too little bandwidth, and it would not be worth setting up, he said.
But some MSU students say they would leap at the chance to take their computers anywhere on campus and stay connected.
“To have wireless Ethernet, I would get weather, news updates, that sort of thing,” said Matt Maslanka, a music performance senior. “Everything I do on my normal computer that I’d like to have on a mobile solution.
“What would I not do with it? I would be ecstatic.”
