Air Time: A Wireless Education

When students return to campus this month, most will be counting mobile computing and communications devices as their most valued possessions. Many are fresh off summer appeals to parents, arguing that sending them back without the right tools will dampen their prospects of academic success. Others have opted to spend their summer job money on a mobile technology upgrade.

The buying habits of college students are leading mobility indicators, providing insights into future trends and driving short-term decisions of cellular companies and campus IT staffs. That's because students are demanding that schools transform campus wireless networks from hotspot convenience services into critical network infrastructures.

The laptop is now the platform of choice for college students, whose nomadic nature makes notebooks such a big win. Increasingly, students work on group projects that mirror the business world and carrying your computer to a group meeting is becoming the norm.

The proliferation of notebook computers on campuses is driving the development of key mobile technologies, including Wi-Fi infrastructure and network access control. Campus IT is wrestling with the most troublesome enterprise Wi-Fi issues, including mobility, security, scalability and guest access. Designers are facing pressure to Wi-Fi-enable everything--from the deepest recesses of historical buildings to packed residence halls and apartments to outdoor public spaces. Many are migrating from older smart APs to controller-based architectures, and universities are also moving from captive-portal authentication to WPA. Because central IT can't realistically manage student computers like a business might manage employee systems, they're finding new ways to assess, quarantine and remediate systems that arrive running all varieties of malware.There's also evidence that Wi-Fi is replacing Ethernet as the default campus network-access technology. In a recent report about public network-access usage at the University of Texas-Austin, there were 35,271 unique users on their public wireless service out of a total population of 61,097. Usage was concentrated in the schools of law, business, architecture and public affairs, patterns that probably foretell significant changes in those professions.

With Wi-Fi now ubiquitous on campus, you won't find many students spending $60 per month for mobile cellular broadband service. But you will find many carrying the latest smartphones, taking advantage of their converged device enhancements and mobile broadband services. Verizon recently reported that 20 percent of its installed base of user devices now supports high-speed EV-DO, and you can bet the installed base among students is much higher.

Even for students, though, there's no obvious phone choice. Phones with portable storage and multimedia capabilities are of interest, but most veteran iPod users are disappointed with the compromises. Portability is highly coveted, as is a thin profile, but portability often translates into poor battery life and inhibits IM efficiency.

The class of 2007 is one of the first student cohorts to be born after cell phones became commercially available. While all the established cellular carriers market heavily to students, companies like Helio and ESPN Mobile will live or die by how effectively they meet these customers' needs. And this new demographic will place significant bandwidth demands on cellular networks, increasing the revenue percentage cellular companies get from data services and pressuring them to develop new ways of delivering content. Even though wide-area wireless network technology is improving steadily, carriers are a long way from satisfying the broadband content desires of generation mobile. n

Dave Molta is a Network Computing senior technology editor. He is also assistant dean for technology at the School of Information Studies and director of the Center for Emerging Network Technologies at Syracuse University. Write to him at [email protected]1022