The Federal Communications Commission won praise from the White House and educators alike with its vote to pursue high speed broadband access for the nation’s schools by modernizing its E-rate program. The FCC says the federal program has already helped bring Internet connectivity to 97% of the nation’s classrooms, but that half of those schools report download speeds that are slower than that of the average American home. To remedy that situation, the FCC wants to prioritize funding for new fiber deployments, lower barriers to new fiber construction, and ensure that schools and libraries can access funding for high-speed Wi-Fi.
High-speed Wi-Fi may end up being the most important part of the FCC’s initiative, as more and more students are using wireless devices in the classroom. Companies that specialize in Wi-Fi for schools know that high speeds are not enough. Unlike many public space Wi-Fi solutions, those in schools need to handle dozens of concurrent users who all try to connect at exactly the same time.
“It’s not an easy thing to do when you have 30-40 students in a classroom all firing up at the beginning of class, all trying to get to one place and download something and make something happen,” said Bruce Miller, vice president of product marketing at WLAN vendor Xirrus. “Within the first few minutes of class, if the wireless isn’t working, the teacher will abandon the technology and go to the whiteboard.”
Xirrus has helped many school districts take advantage of the federal funding available through E-rate. Miller sees the government’s renewed commitment to E-rate as an important complement to the work that companies like Apple are doing to equip schools with mobile devices. He says that some schools may not be prepared for the reality of multiple tablets trying to connect to a Wi-Fi access point at once.
“An iPad, depending on how it’s being used, can pull easily several megabits per second of data,” said Miler. “You start putting 10, 15, 20, 30 of those in one place, in one classroom and that can load up an access point and potentially bring it to its knees. … Tablets in general are not the most robust Wi-Fi devices based on the fact that they’re relatively small they have relatively limited power; they don’t have 3 antennas like a lot of laptops do so they don’t actually transmit as fast as a laptop does, which means they’re actually talking slower and then you try to aggregate all those together you don’t get the overall throughput of the wireless network that you might if you have a lot of laptops, so you have to design the network to handle that.”
Video traffic can be another strain on schools’ Wi-Fi access points. Some schools that supply students with devices restrict their use to certain applications and websites with the goals of maintaining an educational focus and conserving network resources. Other institutions allow students more freedom, and a growing number let students bring their own devices to school and connect to the school’s network.
“There are many schools that we work with that have open policies, so they’ll allow their students to come in with whatever they want,” said Miller. “A lot of school districts have a lot of success doing that.” Miller said that in schools with “BYOD” policies, teachers may end up posting curriculum on social media if it appears that all the students have access.
“That’s how schoools and kids are communicating these days, and I think it makes sense to adopt and embrace those technologies and incorporate them into the learning environment,” said Miller. “You have to do that pragmatically and understand what that impact can be.”
The impact may be far greater this fall than it has been in the past. Schools that allow students to use Wi-Fi networks without restrictions may find those networks overloaded with video traffic thanks to this summer’s addition of video to Facebook’s popular Instagram app. “When Instagram added video, it became the top source of Internet video traffic,” said Miller. “You have students bringing in their tablets, their iPods, what have you, if you allow them on the network, there’s going to be a lot more traffic because of that video. So it’s a very interesting dynamic when you have these situations that you have to consider. What’s running on the network and can I handle it? If the network doesn’t work then all that money is kind of put up there in the air.”
Watch the full RCR Wireless interview with Bruce Miller of Xirrus.
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