jimhaynes
07-23-2004, 01:25 AM
My daughter will begin her freshman year in college this year. Her dorm room has an Ethernet jack to the University’s network. She will be using a laptop and like most teenagers rarely sits in one place so I asked the University computing people if they had any objection to my installing a WAP in her room so she would not have to be tethered to a cable. I received the following reply.
“We do not have a policy against setting up WAPs in student dorm rooms, but we may by this fall. During the past three years we have had to ask a number of students to disable their WAPs because they were interfering with the ability of other students to access our wireless network, and in one case, our wired network. Even Help Desk student employees, who have a fairly sophisticated knowledge of the wireless network, have inadvertently caused interference with the campus network by setting these up at work.
“While it is our goal to allow students to make as much use of new technologies as they can, the amount of time lost by students when things go wrong on their subnet, and the amount of time we spend trouble shooting these problems when they occur have led us to strongly discourage this practice in the past.”
I am sure there is a good technical solution that would answer the university’s concerns. Advice would be appreciated.
“We do not have a policy against setting up WAPs in student dorm rooms, but we may by this fall. During the past three years we have had to ask a number of students to disable their WAPs because they were interfering with the ability of other students to access our wireless network, and in one case, our wired network. Even Help Desk student employees, who have a fairly sophisticated knowledge of the wireless network, have inadvertently caused interference with the campus network by setting these up at work.
“While it is our goal to allow students to make as much use of new technologies as they can, the amount of time lost by students when things go wrong on their subnet, and the amount of time we spend trouble shooting these problems when they occur have led us to strongly discourage this practice in the past.”
I am sure there is a good technical solution that would answer the university’s concerns. Advice would be appreciated.