Report: Rising Number of Universities Adopting 802.11n WiFi Standard

More and more universities are moving toward faster WiFi (News - Alert) services by adopting the latest Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers-approved wireless networking standard, researchers are reporting today.

 

According to ABI Research (News - Alert), universities in North America, especially, are adopting the 802.11n standard. Accoridng to Stan Schatt, ABI’s vice president and research director, penetration in the higher education market is at an impressive 2.3 percent – a strong showing for a relatively new technology.

 

“As video becomes an essential part of the academic experience, bandwidth video requirements and newer laptops, which increasingly will have 802.11n built in, mean that a marriage of convenience will occur between students’ needs to view video anywhere on campus and the ability of 802.11n–enabled laptops to handle the bandwidth requirements,” Schatt said.

 

ABI’s report has implications far beyond WiFi providers or industry insiders who are monitoring the coveted fixed-mobile convergence market.

 

As the Internet evolves into a space where video dominates, as experts are predicting, one technology that’s expected to become more and more in demand is what’s called “video compression.”

 

Experts estimate that uncompressed footage from a camcorder takes up about 17 MB per second of video. Because it takes up so much space, video must be compressed before it is put on the Web. “Compressed” just means that the information is packed into a smaller space – yet many insiders worry about how to handle all the data videos require.

 

One Tarrytown, New York-based video compression company, On2 Technologies (News - Alert), Inc., recently reported $3.3 million in revenue for the second quarter. According to company officials who blog about video compression on a site hosted by TMC, the worry is very real.

 

Contributors recently discussed a white paper from Cisco on the so-called IP data “exaflood.”

 

“In the paper, Cisco (News - Alert) predicts that worldwide IP traffic will surpass half a zettabyte (522 exabytes to be exact) by 2012,” the On2 blog reports. “Previous reports on the same theme have been published by The Discovery Institute and IDC.”

 

Whether or not the Internet can handle this volume of data remains under debate, the bloggers say.

 

“But what if even marginally better video compression could decrease that figure by, say, 20%?” the On2 bloggers wonder. “That would translate to a savings of over 94 exabytes per year. That’s 100,931,731,456 gigabytes.”

 

Meanwhile, ABI says the “innovative use of video in the curriculum” is part of what’s driving an increasing number of universities to adopt the latest WiFi technology. It’s an “especially important” qualification, ABI says, “in light of 802.11n’s five-fold expansion in bandwidth compared to its predecessors.”

 

Other reasons include the need to serve large numbers of users at once, the demands of on-campus security and students’ expectations, the research firm reports.