@ ACUTA: Wireless in dorm saves university close to $100k

PHOENIX—A shortage of time and funding led three executives from Barry University in Miami Shores, Fla., to deploy a wireless network as part of their campus communications network, which in turn could give wireless telephony a greater role at the university.
Speaking at ACUTA’s (the association for information communications technology professionals in higher education) winter conference here this week, Yvette Brown, CIO of Barry, noted that the private Catholic college is struggling to find space at it grows. The campus, which serves about 9,000 students and 2,100 faculty and administrators, has 17 locations throughout Florida. In Miami Shores, the university bought an apartment building to convert to student housing for 143 residents. Barry’s IT policy was that each student should have access to a phone line and a data port, no matter where they resided.
“We didn’t think we’d be deploying wireless throughout the building,” said Hernan Londono, assistant CIO. However, the IT department had to reconsider its plans when it realized that administrators had only allocated $30,000 to bring communications to the building, while the IT department estimated the cost to keep communications on par with its other residential dorms would be closer to $120,000.
A survey of students found what IT executives had suspected and what their own data backed up: college students don’t use the wired handsets in their rooms. About 75% of students said they never used the handsets. Looking into the university’s own data, IT found that of the 211 lines in residential dorms on campus being used, 70% of those calls were made by security guards at the front desk. Regarding computer use, about 5% of students had desktops and about 5% of students didn’t own computers. The large majority of students accessed the Internet on laptops.
Armed with this data, IT worked with the facilities group at the college to pare back the number of traditional phone lines and install a wireless network linking the new dorms back to the main campus, Londono said. The IT department estimated it avoided more than $80,000 in capex costs and another $20,000 by cutting back the number of phone lines it was paying for monthly. Its total capex, because of some equipment it already had on hand, came in at about $31,000.
There were challenges in deploying the wireless network, which uses a combination of Motorola Mobility Canopy and Aruba Networks products. Desktop users had to get wireless cards, which they could buy from the university store, while some international students from the Caribbean had VoIP devices that couldn’t function on the Wi-Fi network. The IT department was able to fix most of the issues, but is aware that as students continue to consume more and more content, they might have bandwidth constraints going forward. Another potential problem is that the line-of-sight network could be impacted in the future as foliage grows between the main campus and the dorms.
As the university gets ready to add another building to its campus, Londono said the IT department will look at a wireless component, along with its traditional wireline assessments.