Over the holiday break efforts were made to improve the quality of wireless service in Freudenberger House. Due to the building’s unique construction, it has proven a challenge to provide adequate wireless service to all users in all locations. There is wire mesh used to hold the plaster to the walls which all but eliminates the ability of wireless signals to travel between rooms or across halls.

 

The previous wireless design, while providing coverage to all users, did not provide sufficient capacity for the quantity of devices attached to the network or the traffic they generated. Over the winter break, a new pilot project was implemented in Freddy which, if proven successful, will allow us to quickly improve wireless capacity in a building which uses the older Juniper wireless system. This project involves swapping out the older Juniper wireless access points for the new higher capacity Aruba access points without changing any of the wiring from the existing system. This should drastically increase wireless capacity of a given building without the time and labor involved in a complete wireless redesign.

 

We are looking forward to evaluating the success of this pilot over the coming semesters, with the possibility of implementing it in other under-capacity locations around campus.