Wifi Revolution

Cisco (News - Alert) announced Wednesday that Montreal's Concordia University has deployed the country's first 802.11n wireless network on a university campus and has incorporated it as part of a larger, innovative indoor-outdoor wireless mobility infrastructure.

 

By adopting of Cisco's next-generation 802.11n wireless technology, Concordia University can expand its campus-wide wireless network. The 802.11n solution is part of the Cisco Unified Wireless Network and offers improved reliability and faster throughput for existing 802.11g implementations.

 

Concordia University deployed Canada's first wireless local-area network in 2001, and in 2003 it rolled out Voice over Internet Protocol across a wireless infrastructure. The University is now enhancing its indoor wireless network with WiFi (News - Alert)-certified 802.11n Aironet 1250 Series Access Points from Cisco and managing a service-oriented outdoor mesh network that offers mobile phone and data storage services. According to Cisco, these two distinct initiatives together strengthen the school's ability to provide reliable wireless performance and innovative mobile services to students and staff.

 

Accessing the indoor 802.11n network is free but the university charges subscribers a monthly rate of CAN $8.99 for outdoor connections. Concordia is making efforts to enable students who are physically on campus to seamlessly offload calls from their mobile provider's network. This will allow them to avoid burning minutes from their mobile phone plans.

 

Concordia University also allows students and staff to subscribe to virtualized desktops, which minimizes software and hardware replacement costs as well as the number of potential attack vectors that viruses and other security threats can exploit. The IT team stores data for subscribers and also provides necessary applications on demand.

 

Andrew McAusland, associate vice president of Instructional and Information Technology Services at Concordia University said in a statement that their IT organization serves as a service provider, a storage provider, a software provider, and more.

 

He explained that they make a conscientious effort to provide their students with advanced services, which represents a significant part of their vision and commitment to all Concordians. McAusland added that their work with Cisco, particularly the combination of 802.11n wireless networking, VoIP over WLAN, outdoor mesh and seamless mobile collaboration technologies, brings this vision to life.

 

 

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